CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A PAINTED LETTER
Walter Sickert was a forensic scientist’s worst adversary. He was like a twister tearing through a lab.
He created investigative chaos with his baffling varieties of papers, pens, paints, postmarks, and disguised handwritings, and by his constant moving about without leaving a trail through diaries, calendars, or dates on most of his letters and work. His knockout punch to forensic science was to decide to be cremated. When a body is burned at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, that’s the end of DNA. If Sickert left behind samples blood or hair that we could be certain were his, we have yet to find them.
Not even a pedigree of Sickert’s DNA can be attempted because that would require a sample from his children or siblings. Sickert had no children. His sister had no children. As far as anyone can tell, none of his four brothers had children. To exhume Sickert’s mother, father, or siblings on the remote chance that their mitochondrial DNA might have something in common with what Bode laboratories miraculously managed to conjure up from the genetic fragments of past lives we gave them would be ridiculous and unthinkable.
The Ripper case is not one to be conclusively solved by DNA or fingerprints, and in a way, this is good. Society has come to expect the wizardry of forensic science to solve all crimes, but without the human element of deductive skills, teamwork, very hard investigation, and smart prosecution, evidence means nothing. Had we gotten an irrefutable DNA match of a Sickert and a Ripper letter, any sharp defense attorney would say that Sickert’s writing a letter doesn’t prove he murdered anyone. Perhaps he simply composed a number of Ripper letters because he had a wacky, warped sense of humor. A good prosecutor would counter that if Sickert wrote even one of those Ripper letters, he was in trouble, because the letters are confessional. In them, the Ripper claims to have murdered and mutilated people he calls by name, and he threatens to kill government officials and police.
The watermarks add yet another layer. To date, three Ripper letters and eight Sickert letters have the A Pirie & Sons watermark. It seems that from 1885 to 1887, the Sickerts’ 54 Broadhurst Gardens stationery was A Pirie, and was folded at the middle like a greeting card. The front of the fold was bordered in pale blue, the embossed address also pale blue. The A Pirie & Sons watermark is centered on the crease. In the three Ripper letters, the stationery was torn along the crease and only half of the A Pirie & Sons watermark remains.
Unless Jack the Ripper was incredibly stupid, he would have removed the side of folded stationery that was embossed with the address. This is not to say that criminals haven’t been known to make numbskull oversights, such as leaving a driver’s license at a crime scene or writing a “stick-up” note on a deposit slip that includes the bank robber’s address and Social Security number. But Jack the Ripper did not make fatal errors, or he would have been caught at the time of his crimes.
Jack the Ripper was also arrogant and did not believe he would ever be caught. Sickert must not have been worried about the partial watermarks on the Ripper letters he wrote. Perhaps this was another “catch me if you can” taunt. The A Pirie & Sons watermarks we found on Sickert stationery include a watermarked date of manufacturing, and the three partial dates on the Ripper letters with the A Pirie & Sons watermark are 18 and 18 and 87. The 87, obviously, is 1887.
Repeated trips to archives turned up other matching watermarks that must not have worried Sickert, either. Letters Sickert wrote to Jacques-Emile Blanche in 1887 are on stationery with the address embossed in black, and a Joynson Superfine watermark. A search through the Blanche-Sickert correspondence in the Institut Bibliotheque de L’Institut de France in Paris shows that during the late summer and fall of 1888 and in the spring of 1889, Sickert was still using Joynson Superfine paper with the return address of 54 Broadhurst Gardens either embossed with no color or in bright red with a red border.