Sickert enjoyed shocking guests he had invited over for tea and cake, and on one occasion, not long after the 1907 slaying of a prostitute in Camden Town, Sickert’s guests arrived at his dimly lit Camden Town studio to discover the lewdly positioned lay figure in bed with Sickert, who was making jests about the recent murder. No one seemed to think much about that display or anything else bizarre Walter Sickert did. After all, he was Sickert. None of his contemporaries – nor many of the critics and academics who study him today – wondered why he acted out violence and was obsessed with notorious crimes, including those of Jack the Ripper.
Sickert was in a superior and untouchable position if he wanted to get away with murdering Unfortunates. He was of a class that was above suspicion, and he was a genius at becoming any number of different characters in every sense of the word. It would have been easy and exciting for him to disguise himself as either an East End man or a gentleman slummer and voyeuristically prowl the pubs and doss-houses of Whitechapel and its nearby hellholes. He was an artist capable of changing his handwriting and designing taunting letters that are the mark of a brilliant draftsman. But nobody noticed the remarkable nature of these documents until art historian Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins and paper conservator Anne Kennett examined the originals at the Public Record Office (PRO) in June 2002.
What had always been assumed to be human or animal blood on the Ripper letters turns out to be sticky brown etching ground – or perhaps a mixture of inks that remarkably resembles old blood. These bloody-looking smears, drips, and splotches were applied with an artist’s brush, or are imprints left by fabrics or fingers. Some of the Ripper’s stationery is “vellum” or other paper with watermarks. Apparently the police never noticed feathering brush strokes or types of paper when investigating the Ripper murders. Apparently no one has ever paid any attention to the some thirty different watermarks found on letters thought to be hoaxes written by some illiterate or deranged prankster. Apparently no one has asked whether such a prankster was likely to have possessed drawing pens, colorful inks, lithographic or Chinagraph crayons, etching ground, and artist’s paints and paper.
If any part of Sickert’s anatomy symbolized his entire being, it wasn’t his disfigured penis. It was his eyes. He watched. Watching – spying, stalking with the eyes and the feet – is a dominant trait of psychopathic killers, unlike the disorganized offenders who are given to impulse or messages from outer space or God. Psychopaths watch people. They watch pornography, especially violent pornography. They are very scary voyeurs.
Modern technology has made it possible for them to watch videotapes of themselves raping, torturing, and killing their victims. They relive their horrific crimes over and over again, and masturbate. For some psychopaths, the only way they can reach orgasm is to watch, stalk, fantasize, and replay their last rampages. Ted Bundy, says former FBI profiler Bill Hagmaier, strangled and raped his victims from behind, his excitement mounting as her tongue protruded and her eyes bulged. He reached climax as she reached death.
Then come the fantasies, the reliving, and the violent-erotic tension is unbearable and these killers strike again. The denouement is the dying or dead body. The cooling-off period is the safe haven that allows relief and the reliving of the crime. And the fantasies begin. And the tension builds again. And they find another victim. And they introduce another scene into their script to add more daring and excitement: bondage, torture, mutilation, dismemberment, grotesque displays of the carnage, and cannibalism.
As former FBI Academy instructor and profiler Edward Sulzbach has reminded me over the years, “The actual murder is incidental to the fantasies.” The first time I heard him say this in 1984 I was baffled and didn’t believe him. In my naive way of thinking I assumed that the big thrill was the kill. I had been a police reporter for the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina and was no coward when it came to dashing off to crime scenes. Everything centered on the terrible event, I thought. Without the event, there was no story. It shames me now to realize how naive I was. I thought I understood evil, but I didn’t.