One of the most distinctive features of the Ripper letters is that so many of them were written with drawing pens and daubed or smeared with bright inks and paints. They show the skilled hand of a highly trained or professional artist. More than a dozen include phallic drawings of knives – all long, daggerlike instruments – except for two strange, short, truncated blades in brazenly taunting letters. One of the stubby-knife letters, mailed on July 22, 1889, was penned in black ink on two pages of cheap paper that bear no watermarks.
London West
Dear Boss
Back again & up to the old tricks. Would you like to catch me? I guess you would well look here – I leave my diggings – close to Conduit St to night at about 10:30 watch Conduit St & close round there – Ha – Har I dare you 4 more lives four more cunts to add to my little collection & I shall rest content Do what you will you will never nap… Not a big blade but sharp [Jack the Ripper jotted beside his drawing of the knife]
Following the signature is a postscript that trails off in the very clear letters “R. St. w.” At first glance this abbreviation might appear to be an address, especially since “St” is used twice in the letter to indicate Street, and “W” might mean West. There is no such London address as R Street West, but I suppose one might interpret the “R. St.” as an odd abbreviation of Regent Street, which runs into Conduit Street. It is possible, however, that the cryptic initials are a double entendre – another “catch me if you can.” They could hint of the killer’s identity and where he spent some of his time.
On a number of Sickert’s paintings, etchings, and sketches, he abbreviates Sickert as St. In later years he puzzled the art world by deciding that he was no longer Walter but Richard Sickert, and signed his work R. S. or R. St. In another letter the Ripper wrote to the police on September 30, 1889 – only two months after the one I just described – there is another similarly drawn truncated knife blade and what appears to be a scalpel or straight razor with the initials R (possibly W) S faintly scratched on the blade. I’m not aware that the elusive initials on these 1889 letters have ever been noticed, and Sickert might have been amused by that. He did not want to be caught, but he must have found it exhilarating when the police missed his cryptic clues entirely.
Regent Street and New Bond Street would have been familiar to Walter Sickert. In 1881, he tagged along with Ellen Terry as she hit the shops of Regent Street in search of gowns for her role as Ophelia at the Lyceum. At 148 New Bond Street was the Fine Art Society, where James McNeill Whistler’s paintings were exhibited and sold. In the July 1889 letter, the Ripper uses the word “diggings,” which is American slang for a house or residence, and can also refer to a person’s office. Sickert’s professional business would have included the Fine Art Society, which was “close round” Conduit Street.
Speculations about what the Ripper meant in this letter are enticing. However, they are by no means a reliable account of what was going through Sickert’s mind. But there are many reasons to think that Sickert would have read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was published in 1885. Sickert wouldn’t have missed its theatrical performances that began in the summer of 1888. Stevenson’s work might have helped Sickert to define his own duality.
There are many parallels between Jack the Ripper and Mr. Hyde: inexplicable disappearances; different styles of handwriting; fog; disguises; secret dwellings where changes of clothing were kept; disguised build, height, and walk. Through the symbolism in his novel, Stevenson gives us a remarkable description of psychopathy. Dr. Jekyll, the good man, is in “bondage” to the mysterious Mr. Hyde, who is “a spirit of enduring evil.” After Hyde commits murder, he escapes through the dark streets, euphoric from his bloody deed. He is already fantasizing about the next one.