None of Annie’s clothing was torn, her boots were on, and her black coat was still buttoned and hooked. The neck of the coat inside and out was stained with blood. Dr. Phillips also pointed out drops of blood on her stockings and her left sleeve. It was not mentioned in the newspaper or police reports, but Dr. Phillips must have scooped up her intestines and other body tissues and placed them back inside her abdominal cavity before covering her body with sacking. Police helped place her into the same shell that had cradled Mary Ann Nichols’s body until the day before, when she had finally been taken away to be buried. Police transported Annie Chapman’s body by hand ambulance to the Whitechapel mortuary.
It was daylight now. Hundreds of excited people were hurrying to the enclosed yard at 29 Hanbury. Neighbors on either side of the rooming house began charging admission to step inside for a better view of the bloodstained area where Annie had been slain.
HAVE YOU SEEN THE “DEVIL”
If not Pay one Penny & Walk inside
wrote Jack the Ripper on October 10.
On the same postcard, the Ripper added, “I am waiting every evening for the coppers at Hampstead heath,” a sprawling parkland famous for its healing springs, its bathing ponds, and its longtime appeal to writers, poets, and painters, including Dickens, Shelley, Pope, Keats, and Constable. On bank holidays, as many as 100,000 people had been known to visit the rolling farmlands and dense copses. Walter Sickert’s home in South Hampstead was no more than a twenty-minute walk away from Hampstead Heath.
Alleged Ripper letters not only drop hints – such as the “Have You Seen The ‘Devil'” postcard, which could be an allusion to East End residents charging money for peeks at the Ripper’s crime scenes – but also reveal an emerging geographical profile. Many of the locations mentioned – some of them repeatedly – are places and areas that were well known to Walter Sickert: the Bedford Music Hall in Camden Town, which he painted many times; his home at 54 Broadhurst Gardens; and theatrical, artistic, and commercial parts of London that Sickert would have frequented.
Postmarks and mentions of locations in close proximity to the Bedford Music Hall include Hampstead Road, King’s Cross, Tottenham Court. Somers Town, Albany Street, St. Pancras Church.
Those that are in close proximity to 54 Broadhurst Gardens include Kilburn, Palmerston Road (mere blocks from his house), Princess Road, Kentish Town, Alma Street, Finchley Road (which runs off Broadhurst Gardens).
Postmarks and locations in close proximity to theaters, music halls, art galleries, and places of possible business or personal interest to Sicken include Piccadilly Circus, Haymarket, Charing Cross, Battersea (near Whistler’s studio), Regent Street North, Mayfair, Paddington (where Paddington Station is located), York Street (near Paddington), Islington (where St. Mark’s Hospital is located), Worcester (a favorite place for painters), Greenwich, Gipsy Hill (near the Crystal Palace), Portman Square (not far from the Fine Art Society, and also the location of the Heinz Gallery collection of architectural drawings), Conduit Street (close to the Fine Art Society, and during the Victorian era the site of the 19th Century Art Society and the Royal Institute of British Architects).
Sickert’s sketches are remarkably detailed, his pencil recording what his eyes were seeing so that he could later paint the picture. His mathematical formula of “squaring up” paintings, or using a geometrical formula for enlarging his drawings without losing dimension and perspective, reveals an organized and scientific mind. Sickert painted many intricate buildings during his career, especially unusually detailed paintings of churches in Dieppe and Venice. One might suppose he would have been interested in architecture and perhaps visited the Heinz Gallery, which had the largest collection of architectural drawings in the world.
Sickert’s first career was acting, which he is believed to have begun in 1879. In one of the earliest existing Sickert letters, one he wrote in 1880 to historian and biographer T. E. Pemberton, he described playing an “old man” in Henry V while on tour in Birmingham. “It is the part I like best of all,” he wrote. Despite recycled stories that Sickert gave up acting because his true ambition was to be a painter, letters collected by Denys Sutton reveal a different story. “Walter was anxious to take up a stage career,” one letter said. But, wrote another Sickert acquaintance, “He was not very successful so he took up painting.”