Portrait of a Killer by Patricia Cornwell

operations had been recent and may have resulted in complications. If indeed he was three or four when this nightmarish medical ordeal began, it could be that his parents delayed corrective procedures until they were certain of his gender. I do not know when Sickert was named Walter Richard. To date, no birth certificate or record of a christening has turned up.
    In Helena’s memoirs she writes that when she was a child “we” always referred to Walter and his brothers as “Walter and the boys.” Who are we? I doubt his brothers referred to themselves as Walter and the boys, nor would I imagine that little Helena came up with the phrase on her own. I am inclined to suspect that the reference to Walter and the boys came from one or both parents.
    Given Helena’s picture of a young Walter who was precocious and dominant, such a law unto himself that he wasn’t placed in the same category as the other sons, it may be that the phrase Walter and the boys was a way of acknowledging his precocity. It may also be that he was physically different from his brothers—or maybe from all boys. If the latter is the explanation, the repeated use of the phrase could have been humiliating and emasculating for the young Walter.
    Sickert’s early boyhood was traumatized by medical violence. When corrective surgery for hypospadias occurs after the age of eighteen months, it can create fears of castration. Sickert’s operations would have resulted in strictures and scarring that could have made erections painful or impossible. He may have suffered partial amputation. His art does not include nude males, with the exception of two sketches I found that appear to have been done when he was in his teens or in art school. In each, the nude male figure has a vague stub of a penis that looks anything but normal. It is clear from Sickert’s letters that throughout his life he was prone to urinary tract infections, which would have been consistent with strictures caused by repeated surgeries. In fact, when Sickert died on January 22, 1942, his cause of death was recorded as uremia (kidney failure) due to chronic nephritis (recurring urinary tract infections), with a contributing factor of myocardial degeneration, or heart disease that can accompany kidney disease.
    There is no indication that Sickert ever suffered from infections or other complications of his bowels, rectum, or anus, and in a letter he wrote to artist Sir William Eden (circa 1901), Sickert mentions how much he wanted “a sound cock again . . .” In a preface written to an exhibition catalog of Eden’s pictures (not dated but probably 1890s), Sickert is discussing art and states that it is not possible to change an “organic living thing,” and uses the example of the impossibility of improving the “shape of a baby’s nose once it is born.” Typically, Sickert is enigmatic, his literary transitions opaque and his explanations few. I cannot say with certainty whether, when mentioning his unsound penis, he was referring to a temporary disability due to another urinary tract infection or to a permanent deformity. Nor can I say with certainty that his allusion to the inability of one to change a physical feature after birth is a veiled reference to his own birth defect.
    One of the most distinctive features of the Ripper letters is that so many of them were written with drawing pens and daubed or smeared with bright inks and paints. They show the skilled hand of a highly trained or professional artist. More than a dozen include phallic drawings of knives—all long, daggerlike instruments—except for two strange, short, truncated blades in brazenly taunting letters. One of the stubby-knife letters, mailed on July 22, 1889, was penned in black ink on two pages of cheap paper that bear no watermarks.
    London West
    Dear Boss
    Back again & up to the old tricks. Would you like to catch me? I guess you would well look