can not be determined, he apparently departed sometime in mid-August. His last London sketch is dated August 4th, and there are no sources to indicate that he was in London after that date. On September 6th, Sickert's mother wrote from St. Valry-en-Caux, describing how Walter and his brother Bernhard were having such a "happy time" swimming and painting there. A letter sent by a French painter, Jacques-Emile Blanche, to his father described a visit with Sickert on September 16th. Walter's wife Ellen wrote to her brother-in-law on September 21st, stating that her husband was in France for some weeks now. There is evidence to suggest that Sickert stayed in the Dieppe area at least until early October, 1888. He painted a local buther's shop, "flooded with sunlight" in a piece he titled The October Sun . Although any one of these several bits of evidence could feasibly be ignored or explained away, the combination of all these independent sources confirming the same thing - namely, that Sickert was in France at the time of the Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Eddowes murders - suggests that Sickert could not have been the killer. While it is true that ferry service between England and France was widely available, and technically Sickert could have travelled back and forth before and after each murder, that is pure speculation and there is no evidence to suggest this was the case. So what does that leave us with? I think at best we can say that Cornwell