Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (4 page)

No doubt there will always be skeptics, Ripperologists, and Sickert devotees who will refuse to believe that Sickert was Jack the Ripper—a damaged, diabolical man driven by megalomania, hate, and a sexual compulsion to kill and mutilate. There will be those who will argue that all the evidence is coincidence.

As FBI profiler Ed Sulzbach says, “There really aren’t many coincidences in life. And to call coincidence after coincidence after coincidence a coincidence is just plain stupid.”

Fifteen months after my first meeting with Scotland Yard’s John Grieve, I returned to him and presented the case.

“What would you do had you known all this and been the detective back then?” I asked him.

“I would immediately put Sickert under surveillance to try to find where his bolt holes [secret rooms] were, and if we found any, we would get search warrants,” he replied as we drank coffee in an East End Indian restaurant.

“If we didn’t get any more evidence than what we’ve now got,” he went on, “we’d be happy to put the case before the crown prosecutor.”

CHAPTER THREE

THE UNFORTUNATES

I
t is hard to imagine that Walter Sickert did not engage in London’s festive activities on the much-anticipated bank holiday of August 6th. For the art lover on a budget, a penny would buy admission into all sorts of exhibits in the squalid East End; for the better off, a shilling would pay for a peek at the masterpieces of Corot, Diaz, and Rousseau in the high-priced galleries on New Bond Street.

Tramcars were free—at least those running to Whitechapel, the city’s crowded clothing district where costermongers, merchants, and money changers loudly hawked their goods and services seven days a week while ragged children prowled the fetid streets for food and a chance to trick a stranger out of a coin. Whitechapel was home to “the people of the dustbin,” as many good Victorians called the desperate wretches who lived there. For a few farthings, a visitor could watch street acrobatics, performing dogs, and freak shows, or get drunk. Or he could solicit sex from a prostitute—or “unfortunate”—of whom there were thousands.

One of them was Martha Tabran. She was about forty and separated from a furniture warehouse packer named Henry Samuel Tabran, who had walked out of her life because of her heavy drinking. He was decent enough to give her a weekly allowance of twelve shillings until he heard she was living with another man, a carpenter named Henry Turner. But Turner eventually lost patience with Martha’s drinking habits and had left her two or three weeks ago. The last time he saw her alive was two nights earlier, on Saturday, August 4th—the same night Sickert was making sketches at Gatti’s music hall near the Strand. Turner handed Martha a few coins, which she wasted on drink.

For centuries, many people believed women turned to prostitution because they suffered from a genetic defect that caused them to enjoy sex for the sake of sex. There were several types of immoral or wanton women, some worse than others. Although concubines, mistresses, and good wenches were not to be praised, the greatest sinner was the whore. A whore was a whore by choice and was not about to retire from her “wicked and abominable course of life,” Thomas Heywoode lamented in his 1624 history of women. “I am altogether discouraged when I remember the position of one of the most notorious in the trade, who said, ‘For once a whore and ever a whore, I know it by my self.’ ”

Sexual activity was to be confined to the institution of marriage and had been ordained by God for the sole purpose of the continuation of the species. The solar center of a woman’s universe was her uterus, and monthly menstrual cycles precipitated great storms of disorders—throbbing lust, hysteria, and insanity. Women were a lower order and incapable of rational, abstract thinking, a view with which Walter Sickert concurred. He was quite eager to assert that women were incapable of understanding art, that they were interested in it only when it “ministers to their vanity” or elevates them “in those social classifications they study so anxiously.” Women of genius, the rare few there were, Sickert said, “count as men.”

His beliefs were not unusual for the era. Women were a different “race.” Contraception was a blasphemy against God and society, and poverty flourished as women gave birth at an alarming rate. Sex was to be enjoyed by women for the sole reason that physiologically, an orgasm was thought to be essential for the secretion of the fluids necessary for conception. To experience the “thrill” while unmarried or by oneself was perverse and a serious threat to sanity, salvation, and health. Some nineteenth-century English physicians cured masturbation with clitorectomies. The “thrill” for the sake of the “thrill,” especially among females, was socially abhorrent. It was wicked. It was barbaric.

Christian men and women had heard the stories. Way back in the days of Herodotus, Egyptian females were so aberrant and blasphemous, they dared to mock God by giving themselves up to raging lust and flaunting the pleasures of the flesh. In those primitive days, satisfying lust for money was desirable, not shameful. A voracious sexual appetite was good, not evil. When a beautiful young woman died, there was nothing wrong with hot-blooded males enjoying her body until it was getting a bit ripe and ready for the embalmer. Such stories were not repeated in polite company, but the decent nineteenth-century families of Sickert’s day knew that the Bible had not a single nice thing to say about strumpets.

The notion that only guiltless people cast the first stone was forgotten. That was plain enough when crowds swelled to watch a public beheading or hanging. Somewhere along the way the belief that the sins of the father will be visited on the children got translated into the belief that the sins of the mother will be revisited among the children. Thomas Heywoode wrote that a woman’s “vertue once violated brings infamy and dishonour.” The poisons of the offending woman’s sin, Heywoode promised, will extend to the “posteritie which shall arise from so corrupt a seed, generated from unlawful and adulterate copulation.”

Two hundred and fifty years later, the English language was a bit easier to understand, but Victorian beliefs about women and immorality were the same: Sexual intercourse was for the purposes of procreation, and the “thrill” was the catalyst to conception. Quackery perpetuated by physicians stated as medical fact that the “thrill” was essential to a woman’s becoming pregnant. If a raped woman got pregnant, then she had experienced an orgasm during the sexual encounter, and intercourse could not have been against her will. If a raped woman did not become pregnant, she could not have had an orgasm, indicating that her claims of violation might be the truth.

Men of the nineteenth century were very much preoccupied with the female orgasm. The “thrill” was so important, one has to wonder how often it was faked. That would be a good trick to learn—then barrenness could be blamed on the male. If a woman could not have an orgasm and was honest about it, her condition might be diagnosed as female impotence. A thorough examination by a doctor was needed, and the simple treatment of digital manipulation of the clitoris and breasts was often sufficient in determining whether the patient was impotent. If the nipples hardened during the examination, the prognosis was promising. If the patient experienced the “thrill,” the husband would be most pleased to know that his wife was healthy.

London’s Unfortunates, as prostitutes were called by the press, police, and the public, did not drift along the cold, dirty, dark streets in search of the “thrill,” despite the belief of many Victorians that prostitutes wanted to be prostitutes because of their insatiable sexual appetites. If they would give up their evil ways and turn to God, they would be blessed with bread and shelter. God took care of His own, so the Salvation Army said when its women volunteers braved the East End slums and handed out little cakes and promises from the Lord. Unfortunates such as Martha Tabran would gratefully take the cake and then take to the streets.

Without a man to support her, a woman had scant means of keeping herself or her children alive. Employment—if a woman could find it—meant working six twelve-hour days making coats in sweatshops for the equivalent of twenty-five cents a week. If she was lucky, it meant earning seventy-five cents a week for seven fourteen-hour days gluing together matchboxes. Most of the wages went to greedy slumlords, and sometimes the only food came from mother and children searching the streets or picking through garbage for festering fruits and vegetables.

Sailors from foreign ships anchored at the nearby docks, military men, and the upper-class male clandestinely on the prowl made it all too easy for a desperate woman to rent out her body for a few coins until it became as dilapidated as the vermin-infested ruins where the people of the East End dwelled. Malnutrition, alcoholism, and physical abuse reduced a woman to shambles quickly, and the Unfortunate slid lower in the pecking order. She sought out the darkest, most remote streets, stairwells, and courtyards, both she and her client usually falling-down drunk.

Alcohol was the easiest way to not be present, and a disproportionate number of people of “The Abyss,” as writer Jack London called the East End, were alcoholics. Probably all Unfortunates were. They were diseased and old beyond their years, cast out by husbands and children, and unable to accept Christian charity because it did not include drink. These pitiful women frequented public houses—pubs—and asked men to treat them to drinks. Business usually followed.

No matter the weather, Unfortunates haunted the night like nocturnal animals, in wait for any man, no matter how rough or disgusting, who might be enticed into parting with pennies for pleasure. Preferably, sex was performed standing up, with the prostitute gathering her many layers of clothing and lifting them out of the way, her back to her client. If she was lucky, he was too drunk to know that his penis was being inserted between her thighs and not into any orifice.

Martha Tabran fell behind in her rent after Henry Turner walked out on her. Her whereabouts since aren’t clear, but one might guess she was in and out of common lodging houses, or if she had a choice between a bed and a drink, she most likely took the drink and dozed in doorways, in parks, and on the street, continually chased off by the police. Martha spent the nights of August 4th and 5th in a common lodging house on Dorset Street, just south of a music hall on Commercial Street.

At eleven o’clock this bank holiday night of August 6th, Martha met up with Mary Ann Connolly, who went by the alias of Pearly Poll. The weather had been unpleasant all day, overcast and unsettled as the temperature continued to drop to an unseasonable fifty-two degrees. Afternoon fog was followed by a thick mist that obscured the new moon and was forecast to last until seven o’clock the next morning. But the two women were used to unpleasant conditions and might have been miserably uncomfortable but rarely vulnerable to hypothermia. It was the habit of Unfortunates to walk about in everything they owned. If one did not have a permanent residence, to leave belongings in a lodging house was to lose them to a thief.

The late hour was lively and alcohol flowed freely as Londoners stretched out what was left of their day off from labor. Most plays and musicals had begun at 8:15 and would have let out by now, and many theatergoers and other adventurers in horse-drawn taxis and on foot braved the mist-shrouded streets in search of refreshment and other entertainment. Visibility in the East End was poor under the best conditions. Gaslights were few and spaced far apart. They gave out smudges of illumination, and shadows were impenetrable. It was the world of the Unfortunate, a continuum of sleeping away days and getting up to drink before venturing out into another numbing night of sordid and dangerous employment.

Fog made no difference unless the pollution was especially high and the acrid air stung the eyes and lungs. At least when it was foggy, one didn’t have to notice whether a client was pleasant in appearance or even see his face. Nothing about the client mattered anyway, unless he was inclined to take a personal interest in an Unfortunate and supply her with room and food. Then he was of consequence, but virtually no client was of consequence when one was past her prime, dirty, dressed like a pauper, and scarred or missing teeth. Martha Tabran preferred to dissolve into the mist and get it over with for a farthing, another drink, and maybe another farthing and a bed.

The events leading to her murder are well documented and considered reliable unless one is inclined to feel, as I do, that the recollections of a hard-drinking prostitute named Pearly Poll might lack a certain clarity and veracity. If she didn’t outright lie when she was interviewed by the police and later when she testified at the coroner’s inquest on August 23rd, she was probably confused and suffering from alcohol-induced amnesia. Pearly Poll was frightened. She told police she was so upset that she might just drown herself in the Thames.

During the inquest, Pearly Poll was reminded several times that she was under oath as she testified that on August 6th, at 10:00 P.M., she and Martha Tabran began drinking with two soldiers in Whitechapel. The couples went their separate ways at 11:45. Pearly Poll told the coroner and jurors that she went up Angel Court with the “corporal,” while Martha headed toward George Yard with the “private,” and that both soldiers wore white bands around their caps. The last time Pearly Poll saw Martha and the private, they were walking toward the dilapidated tenement housing of George Yard Buildings on Commercial Street, in the dark heart of East End slums. Pearly Poll claimed nothing out of the ordinary happened while she had been with Martha that night. Their encounter with the soldiers had been pleasant enough. There had been no fighting or arguments, nothing at all that might have set off even the faintest alarm in either Pearly Poll or Martha, who certainly had seen it all and had survived the streets a long time for good reason.