Read Online Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed by Patricia Cornwell - Free Book Online
Authors: Patricia Cornwell
Tags: General, True Crime
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poetry. His gift of words and his theatrical flair made him a favorite for giving speeches at weddings, carnivals, and other social events. He was active politically during the Danish-German War of 1864 and traveled quite a lot to different cities, encouraging the working men to pull together for a united Germany.
“I want your help,” he said in one undated speech. “Everyone of you needs to do his share. . . . It is also up to those of you who deal with the workers, to the larger tradesmen, factory owners, among you, it is up to you to care for the honest worker.” Oswald could rouse the spirits of the oppressed. He could also compose beautiful music and poetic verses full of tenderness and love. He could create cartoonlike artwork that reveals a cruel and fiendish sense of fun. Pages of his diaries show that when Oswald wasn’t sketching, he was wandering, a practice imitated by his eldest son.
Oswald was always on the move, so much so that one wonders when he got his work done. His walks might consume the better part of the day, or perhaps he was on a train somewhere until late at night. A cursory sampling of his activities reveals a man who could scarcely sit still and constantly did what he pleased. The diary pages are incomplete and undated, but his words portray him as a self-absorbed, moody, restless man.
During one week, on Wednesday, Oswald Sickert traveled by train from Eckernförde to Schleswig to Echen to Flensburg in northern Germany. Thursday, he took a look “at the new road along the railroad” and walked “along the harbor to the Nordertor [North Gate]” and across a field “to the ditch and home.” He ate lunch and spent the afternoon at “Notke’s beergarden.” From there he visited a farm and then went home. Friday: “Went by myself” to visit Allenslob, Nobbe, Jantz, Stropatil, and Möller. He met up with a group of people, ate dinner with them, and at 10:00 P.M. returned home. Saturday: “Went for a walk by myself through the city.”
Sunday he was out of the house all day, then he had dinner, and afterward there was music and singing at home until 10:00 P.M. Monday, he walked to Gottorf, then “back across over the property/estates and the peat bog. . . .” Tuesday, he went by horse to Mugner’s, fished until 3:00 P.M. and caught “30 perch.” He visited with acquaintances at a pub. “Ate and drank” lunch. “Return at 11:00 P.M.”
Oswald’s writings make it clear he hated authority, particularly police, and his angry, mocking words eerily portend Jack the Ripper’s own taunts to the police: “Catch me if you can,” the Ripper repeatedly wrote.
“—Hooray! The watchman is asleep!” wrote Walter Sickert’s father. “When you see him like that, you wouldn’t believe that he is a watchman. Shall I nudge him out of love for humanity and tell him what the bell has tolled [or what trouble he is in for] . . . . O no, let him slumber. Maybe he dreams that he has me, let him hold on to this illusion.”
Oswald’s sentiments about authority must have been voiced within the walls of his home, and Walter could not have been oblivious to them. Nor could he or his mother have been unaware of Oswald’s frequent visits to beer gardens and pubs—to his being “plied with punch.”
“I have boozed away the money,” Oswald wrote. “I owed that much to my stomach. I sleep during my leisure hours, of which I have plenty.”
Whatever prompted his obsessive walks, frequent journeys, and regular patronage of pubs and beer gardens, they cost money. And Oswald could not earn a living. Without his wife’s money the family would not have survived. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in a Punch and Judy script Oswald wrote (probably in the early 1860s), the sadistic puppet-husband Punch is spending the family money on booze and cares nothing for his wife and infant son:
PUNCH APPEARS IN THE BOX:
. . . Ah yes, I believe you don’t know me . . . my name is Punch. This also
“I want your help,” he said in one undated speech. “Everyone of you needs to do his share. . . . It is also up to those of you who deal with the workers, to the larger tradesmen, factory owners, among you, it is up to you to care for the honest worker.” Oswald could rouse the spirits of the oppressed. He could also compose beautiful music and poetic verses full of tenderness and love. He could create cartoonlike artwork that reveals a cruel and fiendish sense of fun. Pages of his diaries show that when Oswald wasn’t sketching, he was wandering, a practice imitated by his eldest son.
Oswald was always on the move, so much so that one wonders when he got his work done. His walks might consume the better part of the day, or perhaps he was on a train somewhere until late at night. A cursory sampling of his activities reveals a man who could scarcely sit still and constantly did what he pleased. The diary pages are incomplete and undated, but his words portray him as a self-absorbed, moody, restless man.
During one week, on Wednesday, Oswald Sickert traveled by train from Eckernförde to Schleswig to Echen to Flensburg in northern Germany. Thursday, he took a look “at the new road along the railroad” and walked “along the harbor to the Nordertor [North Gate]” and across a field “to the ditch and home.” He ate lunch and spent the afternoon at “Notke’s beergarden.” From there he visited a farm and then went home. Friday: “Went by myself” to visit Allenslob, Nobbe, Jantz, Stropatil, and Möller. He met up with a group of people, ate dinner with them, and at 10:00 P.M. returned home. Saturday: “Went for a walk by myself through the city.”
Sunday he was out of the house all day, then he had dinner, and afterward there was music and singing at home until 10:00 P.M. Monday, he walked to Gottorf, then “back across over the property/estates and the peat bog. . . .” Tuesday, he went by horse to Mugner’s, fished until 3:00 P.M. and caught “30 perch.” He visited with acquaintances at a pub. “Ate and drank” lunch. “Return at 11:00 P.M.”
Oswald’s writings make it clear he hated authority, particularly police, and his angry, mocking words eerily portend Jack the Ripper’s own taunts to the police: “Catch me if you can,” the Ripper repeatedly wrote.
“—Hooray! The watchman is asleep!” wrote Walter Sickert’s father. “When you see him like that, you wouldn’t believe that he is a watchman. Shall I nudge him out of love for humanity and tell him what the bell has tolled [or what trouble he is in for] . . . . O no, let him slumber. Maybe he dreams that he has me, let him hold on to this illusion.”
Oswald’s sentiments about authority must have been voiced within the walls of his home, and Walter could not have been oblivious to them. Nor could he or his mother have been unaware of Oswald’s frequent visits to beer gardens and pubs—to his being “plied with punch.”
“I have boozed away the money,” Oswald wrote. “I owed that much to my stomach. I sleep during my leisure hours, of which I have plenty.”
Whatever prompted his obsessive walks, frequent journeys, and regular patronage of pubs and beer gardens, they cost money. And Oswald could not earn a living. Without his wife’s money the family would not have survived. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in a Punch and Judy script Oswald wrote (probably in the early 1860s), the sadistic puppet-husband Punch is spending the family money on booze and cares nothing for his wife and infant son:
PUNCH APPEARS IN THE BOX:
. . . Ah yes, I believe you don’t know me . . . my name is Punch. This also
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