Was Sir Edward Heath the real Jack the Ripper?
Another day, another conspiracy theory. or, rather, another two conspiracy theories. First, Wiltshire Chief Constable Mike Veale is said to be ‘120 per cent sure’ that the former prime minister Sir edward heath was a paedophile. Furthermore, the police are apparently investigating claims that heath was part of a ‘satanic sex cult’ involved in 16 murders.
on the same day, the excitable American crime novelist Patricia Cornwell claimed to have uncovered new evidence to support her longstanding conviction that the real Jack the ripper was none other than the great painter Walter Sickert. She is, she says, ‘more sure than ever’ that Sickert was the Victorian serial killer. ‘I put his toll at a dozen, maybe as many as 20, or possibly more.’
It’s hard to know which of these ideas is the more nutty.
A dozen years after his death, Sir edward ( right) remains an unusually unpopular figure, but even his worst enemies doubt he was a paedophile.
Writer Matthew Parris, who worked for Mrs thatcher before becoming a Conservative MP, has dismissed allegations against heath. ‘If heath was a child abuser, then I’m an aardvark,’ he says.
the case against Sickert might seem, at first, rather more solid. Fifteen years ago, Cornwell spent $2 million researching a book that argued Sickert was the ripper.
When the book was dismissed by critics, she spent yet more money on fullpage advertisements in the Independent and Guardian demanding her work be taken seriously and arguing that the ripper’s victims ‘deserve justice’.
having spent £500,000 and 15 years assembling new evidence, the film director Bruce robinson published a book two years ago in which he declared himself ‘100 per cent’ certain that Jack the ripper was the eminent Victorian composer Michael Maybrick.
At the same time, he dismissed Cornwell’s allegations against Sickert as ‘mindnumbing and outrageous . . . nonsense’.
For some reason, ripperologists, as these people call themselves, prefer to collar celebrities for the crimes. over the years, books have been written arguing the ripper’s murders were committed by, in no particular order, Lewis Carroll, Dr Barnardo, Queen Victoria’s brother, Sir Winston Churchill’s father, George V’s brother, William Gladstone, the novelist George Gissing and the poet J. K. Stephen.
It can’t be long before someone sets out to prove they all did it together, along the lines of Murder
Gon the orient express. Patricia Cornwell’s evidence is patchy, to say the very least. her new book, ripper: the Secret Life of Walter Sickert, revolves around the idea first put about by an unknown man called Joseph Gorman.
In the late Sixties, Gorman announced he was the illegitimate grandson of Walter Sickert. he subsequently changed his mind, saying he was, in fact, the son of Walter Sickert and the grandson of Prince Albert Victor.
this also made him the greatgrandson of edward VII, and the greatgreatgrandson of Queen Victoria, and so on and so forth.
Gorman then claimed that the royal physician, Sir William Gull, was the real Jack the ripper and that Walter Sickert had told him this just before he died, in 1942.
A journalist called Stephen Knight then adapted Gorman’s claim, stating in his 1976 book Jack the ripper: the Final Solution that Sickert w was a coconspirator i in the murders. two years later, Gorman once again changed his mind, saying that his ripper c conspiracy theory was ‘a hoax — I made it a all up’. he was, it seems, something of a perpetual fantasist.
he once told the a author Colin Wilson th that he often went to te tea with the Queen. In 20 2000, he claimed he had be been left several Sickert pictures in the will of Sickert’s third wife, therese, even though therese had not left a will.
HOWEVER, it is a golden rule of conspiracy theorists that a total lack of evidence is the surest sign of a coverup. this means that Patricia Cornwell is more convinced than she’s ever been.
I wonder if she realises that Walter Sickert once met edward heath? In 1934, the 18yearold heath went carol singing near his home in Broadstairs, Kent, and happened to sing outside the house of the 74yearold Walter Sickert.
‘eventually the curtain at the window was drawn aside and through the chink we saw a small, wizened, greybearded face,’ heath recalled in his 1976 book, Music: A Joy For Life.
‘Almost immediately, the curtain slipped back again. We waited. then the door, on a chain, was opened a fraction.
‘ “Go away!” said Sickert and we left.’
For Patricia Cornwell’s next book, I urge her to join forces with Chief Constable Veale. heath And Sickert: the real Jack the rippers could prove just the tonic publishers need for a bonanza next Christmas.