Chasing the Ripper (Kindle Single) by Cornwell Patricia

Author:Cornwell, Patricia [Cornwell, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2014-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

7

ON OCTOBER 4, 2007, I met her in the small village of Wymington, where she lived in a stone and brick cottage climbing with red ivy and roses.

She was ninety-two, dressed that day in a colorful cardigan and green slacks. I found her elegant and extraordinarily articulate, and I was keenly interested if not perplexed by the story I’d come to hear, which in 1990 was the basis of her book Sickert and the Ripper Crimes.

We sat in a living room comfortably cluttered with books and art, and she began to tell me about her mother Violet’s encounter in France with artist Florence Pash, a close friend and confidante of Walter Sickert’s. Jean Overton Fuller wasn’t sure exactly when this took place, but she was a young girl at the time, and she remembered her mother returning to London, “bubbling over with information.”

As I took notes in my journal, Ms. Fuller went on to explain that Florence Pash had told “the most amazing story” about having just been with Sickert, who shocked and frightened her with what he confided. “He said he knew who Jack the Ripper was,” Ms. Fuller recalled, “and that he could never get out of his mind the dreadful bleeding corpses. I was very puzzled by this. How did he come to see the dreadful bleeding corpses? If he saw all of the bleeding corpses, that makes him Jack the Ripper.”

Sickert went on to tell Ms. Pash that a member of the Royal Family “in direct line to the throne” had an illegitimate child he deserted. The implication was this royal deserter was Prince Eddy, the Duke of Clarence. The mother of this child, whose name Ms. Fuller didn’t reveal, deposited her infant daughter on Sickert’s doorstep, so to speak, asking him to keep an eye on the little girl in his studio while he painted.

As the story unfolds, eventual Ripper victim Mary Kelly was working as a tobacconist’s assistant in a shop across the street, and she suggested that Sickert should confront the Royal Family. “If he was good enough to bring the child up, he should get some money for it,” were Ms. Fuller’s words that I wrote down in my journal. “He [Sickert] did say Mary Kelly was as good as telling him to blackmail the Royal Family, which he had no intention of doing.”

Sickert supposedly paid a visit to the palace and took up the matter with Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria’s physician, who would become a Ripper “suspect” when the Royal Conspiracy theory became big news in the late 1970s. What’s fascinating about this detail is that Sickert’s mother, Eleanor, knew Dr. Gull, and I’m not aware that this fact has emerged before now.

In an undated letter she wrote to her close friend Pennie Muller, Eleanor expresses concern about either her husband or one of her sons, both named Oswald, and she says, “Sir W. Gull has given me much comfort—he says that Oswald is absolutely without disease in any organ & the pain of the neuralgia is all there is in the matter.

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