Handwriting quirks and the position of the Ripper’s hand when he wrote his taunting, violent letters lurk in other Ripper writings that are disguised. These same quirks and hand positions lurk in Sickert’s erratic handwriting as well.
Paper of letters the Ripper sent to the Metropolitan Police precisely matches paper of a letter the Ripper sent to the City of London Police – even though the handwriting is different. It is evident that Sickert was right-handed, but video footage taken of him when he was in his 70s shows he was quite adept at using his left hand. Lettering expert Sally Bower believes that in some Ripper letters the writing was disguised by a right-handed person writing with his left hand. It is obvious that the actual Ripper wrote far more of the Ripper letters than he has ever been credited with. In fact, I believe he wrote most of them. In fact, Walter Sickert wrote most of them. Even when his skilled artistic hands altered his writing, his arrogance and characteristic language cannot help but assert themselves.
No doubt there will always be skeptics and critics tainted by self-interest who will refuse to accept that Sickert was a serial killer, a damaged, diabolical man driven by megalomania and hate. There will be those who will argue that it’s all coincidence.
As FBI profiler Ed Sulzbach says, “There really aren’t many coincidences in life. And to call coincidence after coincidence after coincidence a coincidence is just plain stupid.”
Fifteen months after my first meeting with Scotland Yard’s John Grieve, I returned to him and presented the case.
“What would you do had you known all this and been the detective back then?” I asked him.
“I would immediately put Sickert under surveillance to try to find where his bolt holes [secret rooms] were, and if we found any, we would get search warrants,” he replied as we drank coffee in an East End Indian restaurant.
“If we didn’t get any more evidence than what we’ve now got,” he went on, “we’d be happy to put the case before the crown prosecutor.”
CHAPTER THREE
THE UNFORTUNATES
It is hard to imagine that Walter Sickert did not engage in London’s festive activities on the much-anticipated bank holiday of August 6th. For the art lover on a budget, a penny would buy admission into all sorts of exhibits in the squalid East End; for the better off, a shilling would pay for a peek at the masterpieces of Corot, Diaz, and Rousseau in the high-priced galleries on New Bond Street.
Tramcars were free – at least those running to Whitechapel, the city’s crowded clothing district where costermongers, merchants, and money changers loudly hawked their goods and services seven days a week while ragged children prowled the fetid streets for food and a chance to trick a stranger out of a coin. Whitechapel was home to “the people of the dustbin,” as many good Victorians called the desperate wretches who lived there. For a few farthings, a visitor could watch street acrobatics, performing dogs, and freak shows, or get drunk. Or he could solicit sex from a prostitute – or “unfortunate” – of whom there were thousands.
One of them was Martha Tabran. She was about forty and separated from a furniture warehouse packer named Henry Samuel Tabran, who had walked out of her life because of her heavy drinking. He was decent enough to give her a weekly allowance of twelve shillings until he heard she was living with another man, a carpenter named Henry Turner. But Turner eventually lost patience with Martha’s drinking habits and had left her two or three weeks ago. The last time he saw her alive was two nights earlier, on Saturday, August 4th – the same night Sickert was making sketches at Gatti’s music hall near the Strand. Turner handed Martha a few coins, which she wasted on drink.
For centuries, many people believed women turned to prostitution because they suffered from a genetic defect that caused them to enjoy sex for the sake of sex. There were several types of immoral or wanton women, some worse than others. Although concubines, mistresses, and good wenches were not to be praised, the greatest sinner was the whore. A whore was a whore by choice and was not about to retire from her “wicked and abominable course of life,” Thomas Heywoode lamented in his 1624 history of women. “I am altogether discouraged when I remember the position of one of the most notorious in the trade,” who said, ” ‘For once a whore and ever a whore, I know it by my self.’ “