Patricia Cornwell’s ‘Jack the Ripper’ reboot remains deeply flawed Author Patricia Cornwell

Patricia Cornwell has a theory. The wildly successful author of the Kay Scarpetta mystery series believes she’s figured out, once and for all, the true identity of the 19th-century serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. Cornwell explored this topic in her 2002 book, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed, arguing that the Ripper was, in fact, the celebrated British painter Walter Sickert. She was widely ridiculed; one critic wrote, “Por

trait of a Killer is a sloppy book, insulting to both its target and its audience. The only way for Cornwell to repair its damage will be to stay with this case.”

Regrettably, she has. Cornwell’s new book, Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert (Thomas & Mercer, 497 pp.,

out of four), a revised eEEE and expanded edition of Portrait, attempts to convince her skeptics that the case she closed is a closed case. “One of many frustrations in this investigation,” Cornwell writes, “is having very little evidence of where (Sickert) was or what he was doing during any given day, week, month, or year.”

To a responsible investigator such a vacuum might seem like an insurmountable problem, but for Cornwell it’s more like an opportunity — she invents an elaborate, completely nonsensical narrative to fill it, and asks readers to suspend disbelief to come along for the ride.

Ripper opens with character assault. “Today,” she writes of Walter Sickert, “he would be di- agnosed a psychopath, a narcissist.” (I’m a physician; this is false.) She then suggests Sickert had a hole in his penis and possibly had corrective surgical procedures as a child that traumatized him; somehow, she believes, that experience, which she presents little persuasive evidence of actually occurring, transformed him into a mass murderer.

Of the many flaws in Cornwell’s schema, the most glaring is that historians place Sickert in another country at the time of the London murders. Cornwell makes no real attempt to disprove this detail. That’s typical: There is no credible evidence presented that links the post-Impressionist painter to the Ripper murders. Cornwell has doubled down when she should have offered a mea culpa.

It’s not all about what you say, however, it’s how you say it, and in this way, Cornwell achieves modest success. Her brief historical sketches of medieval England, Scotland Yard and the evolution of detective work are charming.

It’s just that they are overshadowed by the prolonged attack on a man who is not alive to defend himself, and probably has nothing whatsoever to defend himself from. Of his correspondence with friends, Cornwell writes that Sickert was “not warm or hinting of any genuine interest in their lives or well-being.” A review of his letters immediately contradicts this.

Ripper is a fundamentally dishonest book, one that uses medical jargon and mitochondrial DNA analysis to confuse the audience and obscure the fact that its conclusions are flawed. Cornwell assumes her readers are fools, unable to properly evaluate scientific evidence. We’re not.

Walter Sickert deserves better. So do we.