… (throws the child out of the box}
Oswald may have been writing and drawing Punch and Judy scripts and illustrations for the magazine Die Fliegende Blatter, and Walter eagerly anticipated every copy of the comical magazine the instant it came off the press. I am reasonably certain Walter Sickert would have been familiar with his father's Punch and Judy illustrations and scripts, and several Ripper letters include Punch and Judy-like figures. Consistently, the woman is on her back, the man leaning over her, poised to stab her or strike a blow with his raised long dagger or stick.
The author of the "Elderly Gentleman" letter to The Times may have been using the silly notion of an elderly gentleman being mistaken as the Ripper as an allusion to police and their desperate herding of great masses of "suspects" into police stations for questioning. By now, no East End male was immune from being interrogated. Every residence near the murders had been searched, and adult males of all ages - including men in their sixties - were scrutinized. When a man was taken to a police station, his safety was immediately compromised as angry neighbors looked on. The people of the East End wanted the Ripper. They wanted him badly. They would lynch him themselves if given the chance, and men under suspicion, even briefly, sometimes had to stay inside the police station until it was safe to venture out.
East End bootmaker John Pizer - also known as "Leather Apron" - became a hunted man when the police found a wet leather apron in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street, where Annie Chapman was murdered. The leather apron belonged to John Richardson. His mother had washed it and left it outside to dry. Police should have gotten their facts straight before word of this latest "evidence" rang out like a gunshot. Pizer may have been an abusive brute, but he was not a lust-murderer. By the time it was clear the leather apron in the yard had nothing to do with the Ripper murders, Pizer dared not leave his room for fear of being torn apart by a mob.
"That joke about Leather apron gave me real fits," the Ripper wrote to the Central News Office on September 25th.
The Ripper was quite amused by many events he followed in the press, and he thrived on the chaos he caused and adored center stage. He wanted to interact with police and journalists, and he did. He reacted to what they wrote, and they reacted to his reactions until it became virtually impossible to tell who suggested or did what first. He responded to his audience and it responded to him, and Ripper letters began to include more personal touches that could be viewed as an indication of the fantasy relationship the Ripper began to develop with his adversaries.
This sort of delusional thinking is not unusual in violent psychopaths. Not only do they believe they have relationships with the victims they stalk, but they bond in a cat-and-mouse way with the investigators who track them. When these violent offenders are finally apprehended and locked up, they tend to be amenable to interviews by police, psychologists, writers, film producers, and criminal justice students. They would probably talk their incarcerated lives away if their attorneys permitted it.
The problem is, psychopaths don't tell the truth. Every word they say is motivated by the desire to manipulate and by their insatiable egocentric need for attention and admiration. The Ripper wanted to impress his opponents. In his own warped way, he even wanted to be liked. He was brilliant and cunning. Even the police said so. He was amusing. He probably believed the police enjoyed a few laughs at his funny little games. "Catch me if you can," he repeatedly wrote. "I can write 5 hand writings," he boasted in a letter on October 18th. "You can't trace me by this writing," he bragged in another letter on November 10th. He often signed letters "your friend."
If the Ripper was offstage too long, it bothered him. If the police seemed to forget about him, he wrote the press. On September 11, 1889, the Ripper wrote, "Dear Sir Please will you oblige me by putting this into your paper to let the people of England now [know] that I hum [am] still living and running at larg as yet." He also made numerous references to going "abroad." "I intend finishing my work late in August when I shall sail for abroad," the Ripper wrote in a letter police received July 20, 1889. Later - just how much later we don't know - a bottle washed ashore between Deal and Sandwich, which are across the Straits of Dover from France.
There appears to be no record of who found the bottle and when, or what kind of bottle it was, but inside it was a scrap of lined paper dated September 2,1889, and written on it was "S.S. Northumbria Castle Left ship. Am on trail again Jack the Ripper." The area of the southeast coast of England where the bottle was found is very close to Ramsgate, Broad-stairs, and Folkestone.
At least one Ripper letter was mailed from Folkestone. Sickert painted in Ramsgate and may have visited there during 1888 and 1889, as it was a very popular resort and he loved sea air and swimming. There was a steamer from Folkestone to France that Sickert would take on numerous occasions in his life, and there was a direct line from nearby Dover to Calais. None of this proves Sickert wrote a Ripper note, tucked it inside a bottle, and tossed it overboard or offshore from a beach. But he was familiar with the Kent coast of England. He liked it enough to live in Broadstairs in the 1930s.
The frustration comes when one tries to trace the Ripper's locations on a map in hopes of following him along his tortuous, murderous path. As usual, he was a master of creating illusions. On November 8, 1888, a Ripper letter mailed from the East End boasted, "I am going to France and start my work there." Three days later, on the 11th, the letter from Folkestone arrived, which might hint that the Ripper really was making his way to France. But the problem is, on that same day, November 11th, the Ripper also wrote a letter from Kingston-on-Hull, some two hundred miles north of Folkestone. How could the same person have written both letters during the same twenty-four hours?
A possibility is that the Ripper wrote letters in batches, not only to compare his own handwriting styles and make certain they were different, but also to give them all the same date and mail them from different locations or make it appear they were mailed from different locations. A letter the Ripper dated November 22, 1888, was written on paper with the A Pirie 8t Sons watermark. Supposedly, the Ripper mailed it from East London. Another letter on A Pirie amp; Sons paper, also dated November 22,1888, claims the Ripper is in Manchester. In two other letters that do not appear to have watermarks (one may have but is too torn to tell) and are also dated November 22nd, he claims to be in North London and in Liverpool.
If one assumes that all of these November 22nd letters were written by the same person - and they bear similarities that make this plausible - then how could the Ripper have mailed them from London and Liverpool on the same day? The absence of postmarks precludes knowing with certainty when and where a letter was actually posted, and I do not accept as fact any dates or locations on letters that do not include postmarks. Inside a Ripper envelope with the postmark 1896, for example, was a letter the Ripper dated "1886." This was either a mistake or an attempt to be misleading.
It is within the realm of possibility that the postmarks may have been different from the dates or locations - or both - that the Ripper wrote on some of his letters. Once the police opened the letters, they wrote down the dates and locations in their case books and the envelope was discarded or lost. The actual dates the Ripper wrote on the letters could be inconsistent by a day or maybe two, and who was going to notice or care? But a day or two could make quite a difference to a man on the run who wants to throw off the police by appearing to be in London, Lille, Dublin, Innerleithen, and Birmingham on October 8th.
It would have been possible for a person to be in more than one distant location in a twenty-four-hour period. One could get about fairly rapidly by train. Based on the schedules in an 1887 Bradshaw's Railway Guide, Sickert could have left Euston Station in London at 6:00 A.M., arrived in Manchester at 11:20 A.M., changed to another train, and left at noon to arrive in Liverpool forty-five minutes later. From Liverpool he could have gone on to Southport on the coast and arrived in an hour and seven minutes.