Sickert scholars agree that he was a “handful.” He was “brilliant” with a “volatile temperament,” and when he was three, his mother told a family friend that he was “perverse and wayward” – a physically strong boy whose “tenderness” easily turns to “temper.” He was a master of persuasion and, like his father, disdainful of religion. Authority did not exist any more than God did. In school, Walter was energetic and intellectually keen, but he did not abide by rules. Those who have written about his life are vague and elusive about his “irregularities,” as his biographer Denys Sutton put it.
When Sickert was ten, he was “removed” from a boarding school in Reading, where, he would later say, he found the “horrible old schoolmistress” intolerable. He was expelled from University College School for reasons unknown. Around 1870, he attended Bayswater Collegiate School, and for two years, he was a student at Kings College School. In 1878, he made first class honors on his Matriculation exam (the exam all schoolchildren took in their last year), but he did not attend a university.
Sickert’s arrogance, his lack of feeling, and his extraordinary power of manipulation are typical of psychopaths. What is not so apparent – although it betrays itself in Walter’s fits of temper and sadistic games – is the anger that simmered beneath his bewitching surface. Add rage to emotional detachment and a total lack of compassion or remorse, and the resulting alchemy turns Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. The precise chemistry of this transformation is a mixture of the physical and spiritual that we may never fully understand. Does an abnormal frontal lobe cause a person to become a psychopath? Or does the frontal lobe become abnormal because the person is a psychopath? We don’t yet know the cause.
We do know the behavior, and we know that psychopaths act without fear of consequences. They do not care about the suffering left in the aftermath of their violent storms. It doesn’t bother a violent psychopath if his assassination of a president might damage the entire nation, if his killing spree might break the hearts of women who have lost their husbands and children who have lost their fathers. Sirhan Sirhan has been heard to boast in prison that he has become as famous as Bobby Kennedy. John Hinckley, Jr.’s failed attempt on Reagan’s life catapulted the pudgy, unpopular loser into becoming a cover boy for every major magazine.
The psychopath’s only palpable fear is that he will be caught. The rapist aborts his sexual assault when he hears someone unlocking the front door. Or maybe violence escalates and he kills both his victim and whoever is entering the house. There can be no witnesses. No matter how much violent psychopaths might taunt the police, the thought of captivity fills them with terror, and they will go to any length to avoid it. It is ironic that people who have such contempt for human life will desperately hold on to their own. They continue to thrive on their games, even on death row. They are determined to live and to the bitter end believe they can dodge death by lethal injection or cheat the electric chair.
The Ripper was the gamesman of all gamesmen. His murders, his clues and taunts to the press and the police, his antics – all were such fun. His greatest disillusionment must have come from realizing early on that his opponents were unskilled dolts. For the most part, Jack the Ripper played his games alone. He had no worthy contenders, and he boasted and taunted almost to the point of giving himself away. The Ripper wrote hundreds of letters to the police and the press. One of his favorite words was Fools – a word that was also a favorite of Oswald Sickert’s. The Ripper letters contain dozens of Ha Ha’s – the same annoying American laugh of James McNeill Whistler that Sickert must have heard hour after hour when he was working for the great Master.
From 1888 to the present day, the millions of people who have associated Jack the Ripper with mystery and murder undoubtedly have no clue that more than anything else, this infamous killer was a mocking, arrogant, spiteful, and sarcastic man who believed virtually everyone on earth was an “idiot” or a “fool.” The Ripper hated the police, he loathed “filthy whores,” and he was maniacal in his sarcastic, “funny little” communications with those desperate to catch him.