Her back bedroom on the ground floor was accessible by windows and sturdy cast-iron drainpipes a person could climb up. There is no mention in police reports that the windows were locked. Only the bedroom double door, the sitting room door, and the front door of the house were locked the next morning when Emily's body was found. Her three keys to those doors were missing when police and Shaw searched the rooms. It is possible someone climbed into her bedroom while she was asleep, but I don't think it's likely.
When she set out from 29 St. Paul's Road that Wednesday evening, she may not have intended to sell pleasure to anyone, but it could be that while she was on her way home with curling pins in her hair, she ran into a man. He said something to her.
"Where are you a goin my pretty little maid?" someone wrote in The Lizard guest book.
If Emily did have an encounter with her killer on her way home or if he was the man she met at the Eagle, he might have told her he didn't mind her curling pins in the least. Will you let me come see you in your room? It is possible Sickert had noticed Emily Dimmock many times in the past, at train stations, or just walking about. The Rising Sun was right around the corner from his studios, not far from Maple Street, which he would later sketch as an empty back road late at night with two distant shadowy women lingering on the corner. Emily Dimmock may have noticed Walter Sickert, too. He was a familiar sight along Fitzroy Street, carrying his canvases back and forth from one studio to another.
He was a well-known local artist. He was painting nudes during this time. He had to get his models from somewhere, and he had a penchant for prostitutes. He may have been stalking and watching Emily and her sexual transactions. She was the lowest of the lowest, a filthy diseased whore. Marjorie Lilly writes that once she heard a person defend thieves by telling Sickert, "After all, everyone has a right to exist." He retorted, "Not at all. There are people who have no right to exist!"
"As you can see I have done another good thing for Whitechapel," the Ripper wrote November 12, 1888.
The position of Emily Dimmock's dead body was described as "natural." The doctor who arrived at the scene said he believed that she was asleep when she was killed. She was face-down, her left arm bent at an angle and across her back, the hand bloody. Her right arm was extended in front of her and on the pillow. In fact, her position was not natural or comfortable. Most people do not sleep or even lie down with one of their arms bent at a right angle behind their backs. There was not sufficient space between the headboard and the wall for the killer to attack her from behind. She needed to be face-down, and her unnatural position on the bed can be explained if the killer straddled her as he pulled back her head with his left hand and cut her throat with his right.
Blood on her left hand suggests she grabbed the hemorrhaging left side of her neck, and her assailant may have wrenched her left arm behind her, perhaps pinning it with a knee to keep her from struggling. He had cut her throat to the spine and she could make no sound. He had slashed her neck from left to right, as a right-handed assailant would. He had so little room to work that his violent sweep of the knife cut the bed ticking and nicked Emily's right elbow. She was on her face, her left carotid squirting her syphilitic blood into the bed and not all over him.
The police did not discover a bloody nightgown at the scene. Absent that garment, it might be presumed that Emily was nude when she was murdered - or that her killer took a bloody gown as a trophy. A former client who had slept with Emily three times claimed that on those occasions she wore a nightdress and did not have "curlers" in her hair. If she had sex the night of September 11th, especially if she was intoxicated, it is possible that she fell asleep in the nude. Or she may have been with another "client" - her killer - who had her undress and turn over, as if he wanted anal sex or intercourse from the rear. After he cut a six-inch gash in her throat, her killer threw the bedcovers over her. All of this seems to deviate from Sickert's violent modus operandi, with the exception that apparently there was no sign of "connection."
After twenty years, Sickert's patterns, fantasies, needs, and energy would have evolved. Very little is known about his activities after he began spending most of his time in France and Italy during the 1890s. So far, documentation that might reveal unsolved murders with striking similarities to Sickert's crimes doesn't exist or has yet to surface in other countries. I found references to only two cases in France, not in police records but in newspapers. The murders are so unspecific and unverified. I hesitate to mention them: It was reported that in early 1889, at Pont-a-Mousson, a widow named Madame Francois was found slain, her head nearly severed from her body. About the same time and in the same area, another woman was found with her head nearly severed from he-body. The doctor who conducted both postmortem examinations concluded that the murderer was very skillful with a knife.
Around 1906, Sickert returned to England and settled in Camden Town. He resumed painting music halls - such as the Mogul Tavern (by now called the Old Middlesex Music Hall, on Drury Lane, less than two miles from where he lived in Camden Town). Sickert went out almost every night and was always in his stall at 8:00 P.M. sharp, he wrote in a letter to Jacques-Emile Blanche. Presumably, Sickert stayed until the performances ended at half past midnight.
During his late-night journeys home, it is very possible he could have seen Emily Dimmock out on the streets, perhaps heading to her rooming house with a client. Had Sickert gathered intelligence on her, he could easily have known her patterns, and that she was a notorious prostitute and a walking plague. Periodically she was an outpatient at Lock Hospital on Harrow Road, and most recently had been treated at University College Hospital. When her venereal disease was fulminating, she had eruptions on her face, and she had a few of these at the time of her death. This should have indicated to a street-smart man that she was dangerous to his health.
Sickert would have been foolish to have exposed himself to her body fluids, because by 1907 more was known about contagious diseases. Exposure to blood could be just as dangerous as intercourse, and it would not have been possible for Sickert to disembowel or take organs without subjecting himself to great risk. I believe he would have been shrewd enough to avoid re-creating the twenty-year-old Ripper scare, especially when he was about to begin his most intense period of violent art and produce works that he would not have dared to etch or paint or display in 1888 or 1889. Emily Dimmock's murder was staged to appear to have been motivated by robbery.
Bertram Shaw arrived home from the train station on the morning of September 12th, and discovered that his mother was already there. She was waiting in the hallway because Emily did not answer the door and she could not get into her son's rooms. Shaw tried the outer door and was baffled to find it locked. He wondered if Emily might have gone out to meet his mother at the train station and the two women had missed each other. He was getting increasingly uneasy, and asked the landlady, Mrs. Stocks, for a key. Shaw unlocked the outer door and found the double doors locked as well. He broke in and flung back the covers from Emily's naked body on the blood-soaked bed.
Drawers had been pulled out of the dresser, the contents rummaged through and scattered on the floor. Emily's scrapbook was open on a chair, and some postcards had been removed from it. The windows and shutters in the bedroom were closed, the windows in the sitting room closed, the shutters slightly open. Shaw ran for the police. Some twenty-five minutes later, Constable Thomas Killion arrived and determined by touching Emily's cold shoulder that she had been dead for hours. He immediately sent for police divisional surgeon Dr. John Thompson, who arrived at the scene around 1:00 P.M. and concluded - based on the coldness of the body and the advanced stage of rigor mortis - that Emily had been dead seven or eight hours.