One Ripper communication received by the police on October 18, 1889, is on an eleven-by-fourteen-inch sheet of azure laid foolscap writing paper, the lettering first drawn in pencil, then beautifully painted over in brilliant red. Apparently no one thought it unusual that a lunatic or an illiterate or even a prankster would elaborately paint a letter that reads:
Dear Sir
I shall be in Whitechapel on the 20th of this month – And will begin some very delicate work about midnight, in the street where I executed my third examination of the human body.
Yours till death Jack the Ripper
Catch Me if you can
PS, [postscript at the top of the page] I hope you can read what I have written, and will put it all in the paper, not leave half out. If you can not see the letters let me know and I will write them biger.
He misspells bigger as an illiterate would, and I don’t believe the glaring inconsistency in a letter such as this one was an accident. Sickert was playing one of his little games and showing what “fools” the police were. An alert investigator certainly should have questioned why someone would correctly spell “delicate” and “executed” and “examination” and yet misspell the simple word “bigger.” But details that seem so obvious to us now have the benefit of hindsight and the analysis of art experts. The only artist looking at those letters then was the artist who created them, and many of his letters are not letters at all, but professional designs and works of art that ought to be framed and hung in a gallery.
Sickert must have thought he had no reason to fear that the police would notice or question the artwork in his taunting, violent, and obscene letters. Or perhaps he assumed that even if a shrewd investigator like Abberline picked up on the uniqueness of some of the letters, the path would never lead northwest to 54 Broadhurst Gardens. After all, the police were “idiots.” Most people were stupid and boring, and Sickert often said as much.
Nobody was as brilliant, clever, cunning, or fascinating as Walter Sickert, not even Whistler or Oscar Wilde, neither of whom he enjoyed competing with at dinners and other gatherings. Sickert just might not show up if he wasn’t going to be the center of attention. He didn’t hesitate to admit that he was a “snob” and divided the world into two classes of people: those who interested him and those who did not. As is typical of psychopaths, Sickert believed that no investigator was his match, and as is also true of these remorseless, scary people, his delusional thinking lured him into leaving far more incriminating clues along his trails than he probably ever imagined.
The distant locations associated with a number of Ripper letters only added to the supposition that most of the letters were hoaxes. Police had no reason to believe that this East End murderer might be in one city one day and in another the next. No one seemed interested in considering that perhaps the Ripper really did move around and that perhaps there might be a link between these cities.
Many were on Henry Irving’s theater company’s schedule, which was published in the newspapers daily. Every spring and fall, Irving’s company toured major theater cities such as Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford, Leeds, Nottingham, Newcastle, and Plymouth, to name a few. Often Ellen Terry made the grueling journeys. “I shall be in a railway train from Newcastle to Leeds,” she dismally reports in a letter written during one of these tours, and one can almost feel her exhaustion.
Most of these cities also had major racecourses, and several Ripper letters mention horse racing and give the police a few lucky betting tips. Sickert painted pictures of horse racing and was quite knowledgeable about the sport. In the March 19, 1914, New Age literary journal, he published an article he titled “A Stone Ginger,” which was racing slang for “an absolute certainty,” and he tossed in a few other bits of racing slang for good measure: “welsher” and “racecourse thief” and “sporting touts.” Racecourses would have been a venue where Sickert could disappear into the crowd, especially if he was wearing one of his disguises and the race was in a city where he wasn’t likely to encounter anybody he knew. At the races, prostitutes were plentiful.