I’m certain who Jack the Ripper was
Thriller writer Patricia Cornwell on her million-dollar mission to expose artist Walter Sickert as the depraved killer
Five years ago, I happened to be looking at a crime scene photograph of Mary Kelly, a victim of Jack the Ripper. Brutally murdered in early November 1888, she’s erroneously believed to be his fifth and final victim. More likely, she was already his seventh or eighth, and unfortunately wouldn’t be his last.
I had looked at this particular photograph countless times, but never noticed a bizarre and perhaps inexplicable detail in the faded sepia print taken by a police photographer’s boxy wooden camera more than 125 years ago.
Modern forensic software can “see” what we can’t, and had revealed some sort of diabolical graffiti on the wooden partition behind the bed where the body had been hacked and defleshed to the bone.
I wondered if my eyes were playing tricks on me. But no: on the wooden wall behind the body appears to be a subtle collection of figurative blotches – one resembling a man’s face with parted hair.
I’d seen similar shapes before in the background of the British impressionist painter Walter Sickert’s work, most notably Minnie Cunningham at the Old Bedford (1892) at Tate Britain, and in Ripper and Sickert correspondence. None of this constitutes evidence, of course, but I was reminded that I’d not finished what I started 15 years ago when I published Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed.
My goal was to shed light on the serial killer’s identity by combining vigorous historical research with cutting-edge forensic technology, including DNA testing. It was the first time real science had been used in this case – and it cost me more than $6 million in the process. Suffice to say that I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
It all began innocently enough. I was given a tour of Scotland Yard in 2001 and met John Grieve, then the deputy assistant commissioner. He was the first person to mention the name Walter Sickert as a possible Ripper suspect. I’d never heard of the artist prior to that and knew next to nothing about the Ripper case.
Given my investigative journalist background and my fictional series about the forensic expert Dr Kay Scarpetta, however, I had a few questions. Who were the suspects? And based on what? Based on nothing but theories, Grieve replied, mentioning a silly tale about Queen Victoria’s grandson supposedly being involved.
Apparently in the early Seventies a picture framer named Joseph Gorman claimed to be Sickert’s illegitimate son, and said the artist had confided in him about the Ripper crimes and a so-called conspiracy involving the Royal family. The tale is long and convoluted, and I place no credence in it beyond the importance of Sickert telling such a story to begin with, to more than one person.
Sensational books and movies followed, and in 1993 a graphologist claimed to have matched Sickert’s handwriting with the Ripper’s. None of this is even remotely conclusive from an evidentiary standpoint. But I got curious. I began looking into Sickert’s paintings, writings, and every detail about his life I could find. From the beginning, I began uncovering unsettling parallels between him and the Ripper.
Over the past five years I’ve spent thousands of hours, as well as another small fortune, investing in Sickert’s art, memorabilia and, more importantly, other original documents, evidence and technologies. I’ve continued working with top scientists and art experts, sifting through piles of archival materials, using non-destructive forensic paper analysis and special light sources.
The upshot is that I have never been surer of Sickert’s guilt. I believe he was responsible for the Jack the Ripper crimes and other debaucheries, including dismemberment, cannibalism and the murder and mutilation of children. The body count could be as high as 20, possibly more. I doubt we’ll ever know.
News reports placed the toll at seven victims by early winter of 1888, but in subsequent police memoirs the number of victims was whittled down to five. The truth is that after Mary Kelly’s hideous murder terrorised London, the police seemed to stop counting. Possibly they wanted to believe the Ripper was gone. He wasn’t; he struck again multiple times, and mocking Ripper letters also went on for years.
Ultimately, it is these letters that have caught him. Or, bluntly put, British forensic paper expert Peter Bower did, when he matched watermarks on five pieces of paper (three from Sickert correspondence, two from the Ripper) that came from a handmade paper run of only 24 possible sheets.
It was too quickly accepted that Sickert had an alibi – that he was in France when the Ripper crimes began. This isn’t true. In various archival sources I discovered dated sketches that place him in London music halls at the time of at least three of the early killings.
Another sketch shows him sitting behind a woman with a big hat on: he had drawn her face, then stabbed her chest 17 times with a pencil, almost perforating the paper.
It’s important to remember that DNA isn’t the only evidence that can solve a case. Far from it, and there is a wealth of information in the original Ripper letters and telegrams. It’s obvious that many of these rude, violent communications were written by an intelligent, artistic individual capable of painting a letter in gorgeous calligraphy, sketching cartoons and writing rhyming couplets.
Under magnification, what appears to be a sketch of a Neanderthallike brute is actually an intricate woodblock print. Such techniques would have been second nature to Sickert.
There are other teases. One letter was sent to a bogus address – Punch & Judy Lane – other letters include Punch & Judy-type illustrations. Sickert’s Danish father was an illustrator for Punch & Judy. There are similar doodles and teases in a guestbook vandalised in Cornwall, possibly in late 1889, with sexually crude cartoons and the signature, “Jack the Ripper, Whitechapel” in several places. British art historian Anna Robins has studied the Lizard guestbook and concluded this vandalism was committed by Sickert.
Certainly it was well known that he was obsessed with the Ripper; he titled one of his paintings Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom and accounts from friends suggest he would dress up as the monster, putting on a red neckerchief and painting in the glow of a bull’s-eye lantern.
Sickert was a narcissist and a sociopath. He could be attractive, entertaining and charismatic, but his friends also knew him as cruel and exploitative. He was a baffling chameleon, changing his hair or name whenever the mood struck.
So what might have created the perfect storm of Jack the Ripper? The underpinnings were probably put in place during the early 1860s when he was a young child and endured three traumatic surgeries on his genitalia or rectum (or both) for a fistula. In the Ripper letters there are multiple phallic allusions in words and in drawings. A “concerned citizen” even offers that the Ripper’s motivation might have been his damaged “privy part”.
Sickert was 81 when he died in 1942. By then he was considered an important, controversial artist who captured low-life Victorian Britain through its shadowy music halls and flickering interiors. His paintings have hung in the Tate and the National Gallery, and sold in the finest galleries for hundreds of thousands of pounds. I discovered one of his paintings hanging in Scotland Yard. He even gave painting lessons to Winston Churchill.
Many don’t understand why I’ve spent so much of my career and resources on this quest for truth. After I was a journalist, I went to work as a computer analyst for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Virginia, helping out in the morgue. I labelled test tubes, wiped up blood and saw, touched, smelled and even tasted death, because the stench of it clings to the back of the throat.
The dead stay dead, but murder isn’t a mystery and I feel that it’s my mission to fight it with my pen. That doesn’t mean this case is closed. It never will be, no matter what anyone believes. Certainly the Ripper didn’t think he’d ever be identified. “I think you all are asleep in Scotland Yard,” he taunted in one of his letters. “You never caught me and you never will.”
Then again, maybe he was wrong about that…
‘I’ve never been surer of Sickert’s guilt. The body count could be as high as 20’
Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert by Patricia Cornwell is published by Thomas & Mercer (£18.99). To order a copy for £16.99 plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk