Three days later, on September 17th, the Metropolitan Police received the first letter signed "Jack the Ripper."
Dear Boss,
So now they say I am a Yid when will they lern Dear old Boss? You an me know the truth don't we. Lusk can look forever he'll never find me but I am rite under his nose all the time. I watch them looking for me an it gives me fits ha ha. I love my work an I shant stop untill I get buckled and even then watch out for your old pal Jacky
Catch me if you can
The letter came to light only recently because it had never been included in the Metropolitan Police records. Originally, it had been filed at the Home Office.
At ten o'clock at night on September 17th - the same day that the Ripper made his debut in what we know as his first letter - a man appeared at the district police court of Westminster. He said he was an art student from New York, and was in London to "study art" at the National Gallery. A Times reporter relayed a dialogue that is so comical and clever it reads like a script.
The "American from New York" said he'd had trouble with his landlady the night before and was seeking advice from the magistrate, a Mr. Biron, who asked what sort of trouble the man meant.
"A terrible shindy," came the reply.
(Laughter)
The American went on to say he had given the land lady notice that
he wanted to leave her premises on Sloane Street, and she had been
"annoying" him in every way since. She had pushed him against a
wall, and when he inquired about dinner, she almost spat in his face
with "the vehemence of her language" and stigmatized him "as a low
American."
"Why don't you leave such a land lady and her apartment?" Mr.
Biron asked.
"I went there with some furniture, and I was foolish enough to tell
her that she might have it and take it out in the rent. Instead she took
it out of me."
(Laughter)
"And I could not take it away," the American went on. "I should be
positively frightened to try."
(Renewed laughter)
"It seems you have made a very ridiculous bargain," Mr. Biron told
him. "You find yourself in an exceedingly embarrassing position."
"I do indeed," the American agreed. "You can have no conception of
such a land lady. She threw a pair of scissors at me, lustily screamed
'murder,' and then caught hold of the lappels [sic] of my coat to prevent my escape, really a most absurd situation." (Laughter)
"Well," said Mr. Biron, "you have brought all the unpleasantness on yourself."
This was the lead police story in The Times, yet no crime had been committed and no arrest was made. The best the magistrate could offer was perhaps to send a warrant officer by the Sloane Street address to "caution" the landlady that she best behave. The American thanked "his worship" and expressed his hope that the caution "would have a salutary result."
The reporter identified the New York art student only as the "Applicant. " No name, age, or description was given. There was no follow-up story in days to come. The National Gallery did not have an art school or students. It still doesn't. I find it strange if not unbelievable that an American would use the language the so-called art student did. Would an American use the word shindy, which was London street slang for fight or row? Would an American say that the landlady "lustily screamed 'murder' "?
Screaming "murder" could have been a reference to testimony at Ripper victim inquests, and why would the landlady scream "murder" when she was the attacker, not the American? The reporter never mentioned whether the "American" spoke like an American. Sickert was quite capable of faking an American accent. He had spent years with Whistler, who was American.
About this time, a story began to circulate through the news that an American had contacted a sub-curator of a medical school in hopes of buying human uteri for?20 each. The would-be purchaser wanted the organs preserved in glycerine to keep them pliable, and planned to send them out with a journal article he had written. The request was refused.
The "American" was not identified, and no further information about him was given. The story gave rise to a new possibility: The East End murderer was killing women to sell their organs, and the stealing of Annie Chapman's rings was a "veil" to hide the real motive, which was to steal her uterus.
The stealing of human organs might seem ridiculous, but it had been barely fifty years since the infamous case of Burke and Hare, the "Resurrectionists" - or body snatchers - who were charged with robbing graves and committing as many as thirty murders to supply doctors and medical schools in Edinburgh with anatomical specimens for dissection. Organ-stealing as a motive for the Ripper's murders continued to be circulated and more confusion eddied around the Ripper crimes.
On September 21st, Ellen Sickert wrote a letter to her brother-in-law, Dick Fisher, and said that Sickert had left England for Normandy to visit "his people," and would be gone for weeks. Sickert may have left, but not necessarily for France. The next night, Saturday, a woman was murdered in Birtley, Durham, which is in the coal-mining country of northeast Eng- (land, near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Jane Boatmoor, a twenty-six-year-old mother who was rumored to lead a somewhat less than respectable life, was last seen alive by friends the night before, on Saturday, at eight o'clock. Her body was found the following morning, Sunday, September 23rd, in a gutter near Guston Colliery Railway.
The left side of her neck had been cut through to her vertebrae. A gash i on the right side of her face had laid open her lower jaw to the bone, and? her bowels protruded from her mutilated abdomen. The similarities between her murder and those in London's East End prompted Scotland Yard to send Dr. George Phillips and an inspector to meet with Durham police officials. No helpful evidence was found, and for some reason, it was decided that the killer probably had committed suicide. Local people made extensive searches of mine shafts, but no body was recovered and the crime went unsolved. However, in an anonymous letter to the City of London Police, dated November 20, 1888, the writer offers this suggestion: "Look at the case in County Durham… twas made to appear as if it was Jack the Ripper."
The police did not link the murder of Jane Boatmoor to Jack the Ripper. Investigators had no clue that the Ripper liked to manipulate the machinery behind the scenes. His violent appetite had been whetted and he craved "blood, blood, blood," as the Ripper wrote. He craved drama. He had an insatiable appetite for enthralling his audience. As Henry Irving once said to an unresponsive house, "Ladies and gentlemen, if you don't applaud, I can't act!" Perhaps the applause was too faint. Several more events happened in quick succession.
On September 24th, the police received the taunting letter with the killer's "name" and "address" blacked out with heavily inked rectangles and coffins. The next day, Jack the Ripper wrote another letter, but this time he made sure someone paid attention. He mailed his missive to the Central News Agency. "Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won't fix me just yet," the Ripper wrote in red ink. His spelling and grammar were correct, his writing as neat as a clerk's. The postmark was London's East End. The defense would say that the letter couldn't have been from Sickert. He was in France. The prosecutor would reply, "Based on what evidence?" In his biography of Degas, Daniel Halevy mentions that Sickert was in Dieppe at some point during the summer, but there is no evidence I could find that Sickert was in France at the end of September.
Sickert's "people," as Ellen ruefully called them, were his cliquish artist friends in Dieppe. To them, Ellen would always be an outsider. She was not the least bit bohemian or stimulating. It is likely that when she was in Dieppe with her husband, he ignored her. If he wasn't hobnobbing at cafes or in the summer homes of artists such as Jacques-Emile Blanche or George Moore, he was off the radar screen, as usual, wandering about, mingling with fishermen and sailors, or locked away in one of his secret rooms.