Chapter 43
When I’d ask him about current crimes, he’d brush me off and return to the subject of the Ripper and his savage violence.
John spent the next hour telling me all about the case and suggested we tour Whitechapel the next morning.
He’d take me to the areas where five of the victims were murdered.
He’d tell me what he knew. I didn’t want to do it, Jack the Ripper of little interest to me.
But I couldn’t say no to John Grieve and was curious.
I had an odd feeling that he had an agenda.
The next morning, I woke up early to the rattle of rain against windows.
I met John at New Scotland Yard, and two of his officers drove us to Whitechapel.
I noticed that there were at least three plainclothes officers shadowing us.
We did a lot of walking, my fingers stiff from the cold, making it hard to take notes.
He took me to the areas where Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, and Catherine Eddowes were attacked on the street, their throats cut, each murder more mutilating than the last. He showed me where Mary Kelly was murdered in Miller’s Court, the flesh cut from her face, her breasts amputated, her right leg flayed to the bone.
London was in a panic as the Ripper wrote mocking and violent letters to the police and others.
“All hell broke loose,” John told me as we walked in the cold and drizzle. “Queen Victoria suggested how to investigate. She advised that East End women wear armor under their clothing.”
He mentioned suspects like the queen’s physician Sir William Gull, and her nephew the Duke of Clarence.
“Rubbish,” was John’s verdict.
After the tour, we stopped for something to eat at the Dickens Coffee House on Wellington Street at the edge of Covent Garden. I asked about the suspects.
“Based on what?” I wanted to know.
“Based on absolutely nothing.” John’s frustration seemed fresh, as if the murders had happened recently.
I asked if there was any evidence left, and he said only the Ripper’s letters and telegrams that he sent mostly to the police and other officials. John believed that many were fraudulent, hoaxes, the product of “crackpots” writing. But some seemed to have been penned by the killer.
“Well, you can tell a lot from letters,” I said as we drove back to New Scotland Yard after my tour. “The paper, the ink, what they say, and best of all might there be any DNA under an envelope flap or a stamp?”
He told me the documents were locked in a vault at the Public Record Office (now called the National Archives). I replied that I would look at them. Then he offered a tip that would alter the course of my career and in many ways disrupt my life forever.
“There’s one other interesting chap you might want to check out as long as you’re going to look into it,” John said.
It flared in my thoughts that I hadn’t agreed to look into anything. What was going on? I was feeling recruited.
“An artist named Walter Sickert,” John went on. “He painted some murder pictures. In one of them in particular a clothed man is sitting on the edge of a bed with the body of a nude prostitute he just murdered. It’s called The Camden Town Murder. I’ve always wondered about him.”
He said that Sickert had started out as an actor and was a master of disguise.
Born in Munich, Germany, he was extremely handsome, charming, a genius who spoke many languages.
He’d been mentioned before in connection with the Ripper crimes, and I should start digging.
In a diplomatic way, John was giving me an assignment.
“Why don’t you investigate him yourself if you’re suspicious?” I inquired. “You’re the most senior and respected investigator at the Yard. Can’t you do that?”
“No,” he said. “It’s not possible.”
He explained that the Yard couldn’t work on a case that old. There was no one left to arrest, including Walter Sickert, who died in 1942 at the age of eighty-one. John warned that people didn’t really want to solve the case. It was much more fun to spin endless theories, most of them baseless.
“It’s a cottage industry,” he explained. “It’s like proving there’s no Loch Ness Monster. The Scots would be so mad!”
I began investigating the Ripper as if I were a police reporter again, and on July 6, 2001, I visited John Lessore. A well-respected artist, he was the nephew of Sickert’s third wife, Thérèse Lessore, and had a studio in Peckham. I began asking questions about Walter Sickert.
“You should write his biography,” John Lessore said.
I didn’t divulge that I intended to write about Sickert, but it wouldn’t be the story John hoped.
I brought up a fistula, a tubelike passage often caused by infection.
I’d read in several books that Sickert had suffered such an affliction.
As a young child he had three surgeries to correct it, two in Munich, one in London.
What a horror those must have been in the early 1860s.
“I’m wondering if you know what this fistula might have been,” I asked John Lessore.
“He had a hole in his penis,” he answered without pause.
That detail became a point of huge contention for my many critics.
Later I was accused of making up the detail.
Most assuredly, I didn’t. I began collecting antique weapons and bullseye lanterns of the period, experimenting with them.
Visiting archival sources in the U.S., U.K.
, and France, I read Sickert’s original letters and those of his wives and associates.
On October 29, 1888, pathologist Dr. Thomas Openshaw received a letter from the Ripper. The paper it was written on would become significant when renowned paper analyst Peter Bower matched it to Walter Sickert’s own stationery. Peter would find matches with multiple Ripper and Sickert letters.
For the next year I was in and out of the U.K. doing research while having thoughts about nothing else. My writing office in Greenwich was filled with old books and newspapers, the walls arranged with Sickert artwork that I found unsettling. After a while, I took all of it down.
I’d hear doors shutting when no one was home but me.
The floor would creak overhead as if someone was walking.
My house on Lower Cross Road was new, and maybe the noises had to do with the construction “settling,” but it seemed haunted.
After a while, when I’d hear another door shut, I’d say out loud, “Walter? Are you coming or going?”
One night I dreamed I was at a party in London, and he was there looking quite handsome in a tuxedo, sipping a glass of champagne, his eyes boring into me.
He suggested I accompany him to the cellar.
He had artwork he wanted to show me. He was certain I would find it interesting.
I knew not to go with him but did anyway, waking up before we reached the bottom of the old wooden stairs.
All kinds of bizarre things were happening, and they were observed by my assistant Irene Shulgin and others.
A window would fly open on its own. Computers would go offline for no apparent reason.
Lights flickered or went out. Our plane lost autopilot as we flew across the ocean.
There were fogs, fires, and hurricane-strength winds.
One of the eeriest events happened in early March 2002 when we flew to Cornwall, England. As a young man Sickert had painted there while apprenticing to James McNeill Whistler, an American master who lived in London. Most people know him for his painting Whistler’s Mother.
During the Victorian era many of England’s illustrious would stay at the Lizard Guest House in Cornwall.
I’d gotten word that one of the guestbooks dating back to the 1880s had been signed multiple times by Jack the Ripper.
My first thought was this was a hoax, a prank.
Maybe it was an attempt at hoodwinking me into buying something bogus for a lot of money.
Over the years I would put up with plenty of that sort of thing while investigating the Ripper.
Someone found a Gladstone bag in a well near Sickert’s house.
It must have belonged to him. I didn’t believe it but had to check it out, bringing U.K.
DNA expert Turi King with me to swab the bag.
It looked like it had been bought at a yard sale.
In 2005 an antique collector in Venice, Italy, claimed to own a Sickert painting that featured a bloody knife.
Harvard art experts were fooled into thinking the painting might be genuine, and I decided to check it out.
Staci and I traveled to Venice with Sickert art expert Anna Gruetzner Robins, and a translator since none of us spoke Italian.
We were driven to the antique dealer’s house out in the middle of nowhere.
The painting was an obvious fake, the varnish on it still tacky.
It turned out the dealer’s wife was a fan, and he’d promised my appearance as her birthday present.
The table was set, and they offered us cocktails.
We didn’t eat or drink anything. We didn’t linger.
The only thing good about that trip is what happened during the flight back to London.
As I read the newspaper on the plane, I came across an article about forty-five-year-old Debbie Munro, a wife, and mother of three.
She was terminally ill with colon and liver cancer.
The National Health Service wouldn’t pay for the drug Avastin because of her advanced stage.
The NHS could offer only palliative care. The Munros had been forced to sell their home to buy her medication. They were considering going to the U.S. where Avastin was available, but that wasn’t affordable either.
“This is awful.” I showed the article to Staci as we sat together on the plane.
Agreeing to do something about it, she got in touch with the Munros. We invited them to stay at the Savoy Hotel with us for a few days and donated ￡30,000 to help with the medicine.
“We had such a wonderful weekend,” Debbie Munro’s husband, John, told BBC News on August 11. “We had all spent time together as a family. It was so lovely.”
Three days later Debbie died, and John offered to return the money. We said absolutely not. Hopefully it would help with other needs such as buying a house. That’s exactly what Debbie would have wanted. When I hear stories like hers, I remember the desperate times in my own life.
One of the Bible verses I’ve always taken to heart is “for unto to whom much is given, of him shall be much required.” I don’t know why the Bible infers that this applies only to males.
It applies to all. Throughout my career I’ve done my best to pay forward, whether it’s donating millions to animal rescue, college educations, literacy, or crimefighting.
Staci and I give away hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly in tax-free gifts to help people who have nowhere else to turn.
I don’t say this to boast or pretend I’m such a wonderful person.
I’m not. My flaws and stupid mistakes are endless.
But if I don’t leave this Earth a little better than I found it, I have failed.
Helping others is a joy and a privilege.
When I got the tip about the Lizard guestbook in 2001, I arranged to check it out immediately. I wasn’t expecting much as I headed to Cornwall with Irene, my mother, and several others. When our private jet landed at Newquay Airport, the wind was so fierce we couldn’t open the plane door at first.
Inside the small terminal, our passports were checked by a tall man in a dress uniform. I thought his attire seemed incredibly strange for a customs officer. He looked old-fashioned military.