Free Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed by Patricia Cornwell Page A

intervened on her behalf. Nelly preferred her “pretty little fellows” with their fair hair and sailor suits to her homely, redheaded daughter.
    Walter was by far the prettiest of the fair little fellows and the “cleverest.” He usually got his way through manipulation, deception, or charm. He was the leader, and other children did what he demanded, even if Walter’s “games” were unfair or unpleasant. When playing chess, he thought nothing of changing the rules as it suited him, such as making it possible to check the king without consequences. When Walter was a bit older, after the family had moved to England in 1868, he began recruiting friends and siblings to play scenes from Shakespeare, and some of his stage direction was nasty and degrading. In an unpublished draft of Helena’s memoirs, she recalled:
I must have been a child when [Walter] roped us in to rehearse the three witches to his Macbeth in a disused quarry near Newquay, which innocently I thought was really called “The Pit of Achaeron.” Here he drilled us very severely. I was made (being appropriately thin and red-haired) to discard my dress & shoes & stockings, in order to brood over the witches cauldron, or stride around it, regardless of thorns and sharp stones, in my eyes the acrid smoke of scorching seaweed.
    This account as well as other telling ones were softened or deleted by the time Helena’s memoirs were published, and were it not for a six-page handwritten remnant that was donated to the National Art Library of the Victoria and Albert Museum, little would be known about Walter’s youthful tendencies. I suspect that much has been censored.
    In the Victorian era and the early 1900s it was unheard of to tell all, especially about family. Queen Victoria herself could have burned down one of her palaces with the conflagration she made of her private papers. By the time Helena published her memoirs in 1935, her brother Walter was seventy-five years old and a British icon hailed by young artists as the roi, or king. His sister might have had second thoughts about lacerating him in her book. She was one of the few people he was never able to dominate, and the two of them were never close.
    It isn’t clear that she even knew quite what to make of him. He was “. . . at once the most fickle and the most constant of creatures . . . unreasonable, but always rationalizing. Utterly neglectful of his friends and relations in normal times and capable of the utmost kindness, generosity and resourcefulness in crises—never bored, except by people.”
    Sickert scholars agree that he was a “handful.” He was “brilliant” with a “volatile temperament,” and when he was three, his mother told a family friend that he was “perverse and wayward”—a physically strong boy whose “tenderness” easily turns to “temper.” He was a master of persuasion and, like his father, disdainful of religion. Authority did not exist any more than God did. In school, Walter was energetic and intellectually keen, but he did not abide by rules. Those who have written about his life are vague and elusive about his “irregularities,” as his biographer Denys Sutton put it.
    When Sickert was ten, he was “removed” from a boarding school in Reading, where, he would later say, he found the “horrible old schoolmistress” intolerable. He was expelled from University College School for reasons unknown. Around 1870, he attended Bayswater Collegiate School, and for two years, he was a student at Kings College School. In 1878, he made first class honors on his Matriculation exam (the exam all schoolchildren took in their last year), but he did not attend a university.
    Sickert’s arrogance, his lack of feeling, and his extraordinary power of manipulation are typical of psychopaths. What is not so apparent—although it betrays itself in Walter’s fits of temper and sadistic games—is the anger that simmered beneath his bewitching surface. Add rage to