In his early twenties, Sickert was still an actor and touring with Henry Irving’s company. He was acquainted with the famous architect Edward W. Godwin, a theater enthusiast, costume designer, and good friend of Whistler’s. Godwin lived with Ellen Terry during Sickert’s early acting days and had built Whistler’s house – the White House, on Tite Street in Chelsea. Godwin’s widow, Beatrice, had just married Whistler on August 11, 1888. Although I can’t prove that biographical and geographical details such as these were connected in Sickert’s psyche when Ripper letters were mailed or purportedly written from the London locations cited, I can speculate that these areas of the metropolis at least would have been familiar to him. They were not likely places for “homicidal lunatics” or East End “low life paupers” to have spent much time.
While it is true that many of the Ripper letters were mailed in the East End, it is also true that many of them were not. But Sickert spent a fair amount of time in the East End and probably knew that run-down pan of London better than the police did. The orders of the day did not allow Metropolitan Police constables to enter pubs or mingle with the neighbors. Beat police were supposed to stay on their beats, and to enter lodging houses or pubs without cause or simply to stray from one’s measured walks around assigned blocks was to invite reprimand or suspension. Sickert, however, could mingle as he pleased. No place was off-limits to him.
The police seemed to suffer from East End myopia. No matter how much the Ripper tried to inveigle them into investigating other locales or likely haunts, he was mostly ignored. There appears to be no record that the police thoroughly investigated the postmarks or locations of Ripper letters not mailed from the East End or thought twice about other letters that were allegedly written or mailed from other cities in Great Britain. Not all envelopes have survived, and without a postmark one has only the location that the Ripper wrote on his letter. That may or may not have been where he really was at the time.
According to the postmarks, the alleged locations of the Ripper at various times, or where he claimed to be going, include Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Dublin, Belfast, Limerick, Edinburgh, Plymouth, Leicester, Bristol, Clapham, Woolwich, Nottingham. Portsmouth, Croydon, Folkestone, Gloucester, Leith, Lille (France), Lisbon (Portugal), and Philadelphia (U.S.A.).
A number of these locations seem extremely unlikely, especially Portugal and the United States. As far as anyone seems to know, Walter Sickert never visited either country. Other letters and their alleged dates make it almost impossible to believe that, for example, he could have mailed or written letters in London, Lille, Birmingham, and Dublin all on the same day, October 8. But again, what is unclear 114 years after the fact – when so many envelopes and their postmarks are missing, when evidence is cold and witnesses are dead – is whether letters really were written on a given date and where they were written from. Only postmarks and eyewitnesses could swear to that.
Of course not all the Ripper letters were written by Sickert, but he could disguise his handwriting in ways an average person could not, and no records have yet turned up to prove he wasn’t in a given city on a given day. The month of October 1888 was a busy letter-writing period for the Ripper. Some eighty letters written that month still exist, and it would make sense for the killer to be on the run after multiple, closely spaced murders. As the Ripper himself wrote in several letters, Whitechapel was getting too hot for him and he was seeking peace and quiet in distant ports.
We know from modern cases that serial killers tend to move around. Some virtually live in their cars. October would have been a convenient time for Sickert to disappear from London. His wife, Ellen, was part of a Liberal delegation that was holding meetings in Ireland to support Home Rule and Free Trade. She was away from England almost the entire month of October. If she and Sickert had any contact at all during this separation, no letters or telegrams to each other seem to have survived.