Ripper
Author: Patricia Cornwell
Date: 2017-02-27 00:00:00+00:00
Description: A #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller. From New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell comes Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert , a comprehensive and intriguing exposé of one of the world’s most chilling cases of serial murder—and the police force that failed to solve it. Vain and charismatic Walter Sickert made a name for himself as a painter in Victorian London. But the ghoulish nature of his art—as well as extensive evidence—points to another name, one that’s left its bloody mark on the pages of history: Jack the Ripper. Cornwell has collected never-before-seen archival materi
Publisher: Brilliance Audio

Other titles by Patricia Cornwell

SCARPETTA SERIES

Postmortem

Body of Evidence

All That Remains

Cruel and Unusual

The Body Farm

From Potter’s Field

Cause of Death

Unnatural Exposure

Point of Origin

Black Notice

The Last Precinct

Blow Fly

Trace

Predator

Book of the Dead

Scarpetta

The Scarpetta Factor

Port Mortuary

Red Mist

The Bone Bed

Dust

Flesh and Blood

NONFICTION

Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed

ANDY BRAZIL SERIES

Hornet’s Nest

Southern Cross

Isle of Dogs

WIN GARANO SERIES

At Risk

The Front

BIOGRAPHY

Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

OTHER WORKS

Food to Die For: Secrets from Kay Scarpetta’s Kitchen

Life’s Little Fable

Scarpetta’s Winter Table

Text copyright © 2014 Patricia Cornwell

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

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eISBN: 9781477879146

Cover design by Shasti O’Leary-Soudant

Contents

Preface

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

About the Author

Preface

THE QUESTIONS I’m asked most frequently have nothing to do with my Scarpetta novels or my personal life. People want to know why I remain convinced that Jack the Ripper was the celebrated British artist Walter Richard Sickert.

How is it possible and why am I so sure? Does it make sense that a highly intelligent, multilingual, handsome man who hobnobbed with the rich and famous would murder and mutilate? Did the well-bred woman he was married to at the time have a clue? Did his friends and colleagues suspect him? How did he get away with serial homicides for more than a century?

It’s fascinating to ponder the name Jack the Ripper. Who thought of it? I’m quite certain he did. The Ripper’s communications indicate he dubbed himself that and many other variations of it. He called himself all sorts of things, whatever pleased and amused him at the moment. Sickert was accustomed to having stage names. As a child he was acting in his homespun Shakespeare plays, and when he reached his teens he chose the theater as a career.

As an actor, he called himself Mr. Nemo. Nemo is Latin for nobody, and he very well may have felt like one. By the time he was in his late twenties, when the Ripper murders began, Sickert had abandoned acting, and he was a fledgling artist who was getting unfavorable critical reviews. He was supported by his much older, prim and proper wife and berated and belittled by his master, the megalomaniacal James McNeill Whistler.

Prior to my investigation into this case, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, it doesn’t appear that any significance was attributed to the fact that some of the mocking, taunting communications the Ripper sent to the police and the press were signed Nemo. He also signed a postal telegram Mr. Nobody, then crossed it out and wrote Jack the Ripper instead. At the time, the police paid no attention to curiosities like this.

They weren’t interested in another Ripper tease with a fake return address of Punch & Judy St. No attention was paid to several Ripper documents that feature cartoonish stick figures evocative of the violent puppet shows. When Sickert was growing up, his heavy-drinking, sadistic father was an illustrator and scriptwriter for Punch and Judy.

The Ripper’s communications are illustrated with all sorts of doodles, sketches and cartoons. He was fond of artistic media such as paints and crayons, and he wrote his ugly communications on some of the same watermarked stationery Sickert used. Forensic analysis has matched paper from both the Ripper and Sickert. If one considers how many of their letters are lost, it’s extraordinary to imagine the number of matches there might be. The hundreds of extant Ripper-related communications are probably only a fraction of his output.

Sickert was, among other things, a graphomaniac (a compulsive writer). So was the Ripper. Early on, the police placed no stock in the crude, violent documents that today are the only accepted physical evidence left in this case. Not all of the telegrams, notes, letters and envelopes that the police decided to keep necessarily survived. Some were destroyed in World War II. Others vanished after the Ripper case files were unsealed and made available to the public.

The examples I’m giving are but a few of the details that create the intricate layers of this investigation. It’s an extraordinarily complex one, rife with maddening subtleties. The more you look, the more you find. There’s no smoking gun. I’m convinced there never will be. The police didn’t know what to look for at the time, and I’ve concluded it’s too late for fingerprints or DNA that are unimpeachably reliable. Succinctly put, a crime scene is like an archaeology site. If an excavation is botched or bulldozed away, there’s no going back.

By the time Sickert reached his late twenties he’d created a new dramatic role and cast himself in it for real. There are many possible explanations for what stoked his raging, sexually violent compulsions, but the most compelling one is the three surgeries to his genitals and/or rectum that he had endured by the time he was five. He may have been left physically incapable of sex. Unquestionably, what’s been described as “medical violence” would have had a profound impact on him psychologically.

My claims about his surgeries and the likely deformity he was born with (described to me as “a hole in his penis”) continue to be angrily disputed. It’s as if I had insulted the manhood of England. I didn’t. I simply repeated what I had read and was told about Sickert’s “fistula.” For the most part, the exact nature of this defect remains a mystery. But it was significant enough for his family to risk corrective procedures that in the early 1860s could have killed him.

I had no idea at the time of my first book how far from finished I was with the investigation. It’s rather stunning to realize I’ve continued it ever since. Funny thing is, it’s not because I’ve wanted to—not hardly when I consider the distractions, frustrations and aspersions, not to mention the time and expense.

But it’s been the right thing to do. My pursuit of the Ripper isn’t a murder mystery or a thriller. It isn’t an essay, a movie or a TV show. He isn’t mere entertainment, and the defenseless women and children I believe he targeted were destroyed for real. They suffered and died terrifying deaths, and I don’t believe for a minute that the Ripper killed only the prostitutes we hear about—five and only five.

This is a baseless claim that no longer should be accepted as an indisputable fact. The mundane truth is that after Mary Kelly was butchered in early November of 1888, the police stopped counting. If they didn’t attribute any additional acts of depraved violence to the Ripper, then maybe London’s frightened citizens could assume this brutish madman had vanished. How convenient to suppose he was locked up in an asylum or better yet dead.

Without a doubt the Ripper was an embarrassment to the government, to the police, to Queen Victoria herself. His crimes made a mockery of them and drew international attention to the appallingly impoverished conditions of the Great Metropolis. Writers such as Charles Dickens had done enough damage with their depictions of orphans, child laborers, vicious overseers, slumlords and rat-infested hovels. As the queen remained bereft over the death of her husband, Prince Albert, she busied herself with the expansion of her empire and didn’t need to be plagued with such outrageously sensationalized crimes and what they might imply. Worst of all, there was nothing she could do about it any more than the police could.

Most of what went wrong in the Ripper investigation was due to ignorance. Serial crimes and the offenders who commit them weren’t viewed then as they are now, and the Ripper got better at his role. He became more skilled in the execution of his lustful and enraged violent acts, evolving rapidly as the body count climbed. It wasn’t understood in those days that a killer’s modus operandi can change, that sexual murders often become increasingly violent. Certainly the Ripper’s did.

I put his toll at a dozen, maybe as many as twenty or possibly more, and he didn’t slaughter only prostitutes—or “Unfortunates,” as they were called. It’s also not true that he struck exclusively in the East End slums or even just in London. He killed in multiple cities, and he quickly escalated to mutilation, dismemberment and possibly cannibalism. His victim selection began to include children, and he boasted about all of it in his written communications that for the most part were ignored.

Many of his victims will never be identified or linked to him. Their cases remain unsolved horrors that tore apart loved ones and falsely pinned crimes on innocent people. In some instances, the accused were hanged. They likely weren’t guilty of anything more than being peculiar, suspicious, uncouth, mentally impaired, “sexually insane” (homosexual) or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s appalling that many witnesses were inebriated. They were in poorly lit parts of the slums, and didn’t have their glasses on (assuming they could afford them).

When the Ripper’s murders began in the summer of 1888, there was no such thing as using science in police investigations. Imagine living in a time when a witness claiming to have seen you in the area of a violent crime might be all it takes to bring about your arrest. Maybe you’re sent to prison. Maybe you’re sentenced to death.

Some of the men of interest in the Ripper’s murders became such pariahs they couldn’t leave their homes without the risk of being pursued by a mob. What caused the police to take notice of these hapless individuals to begin with? I’ve concluded that the Ripper himself had a lot to do with it. An aspect of this case I didn’t realize early on is that his diabolical antics included more than just his very public taunts.

He also enjoyed cooking up mayhem, uproars and other chaotic concoctions. He deliberately implicated certain individuals in homicides he in fact committed. He disrupted, damaged and ruined those who cared for him. He thought nothing of wrecking reputations and careers, and breaking hearts. What great fun until he got bored. All forms of life were nothing to him beyond what he could exploit. He was supremely self-absorbed and narcissistic. Most people were stupid or fools, and there was no God. Sickert couldn’t love, although his obsessions, his stalking of beautiful actresses or potential wives, may have been confused with love. He had no empathy and complained at least once that he couldn’t “feel.”

We rarely think about the Ripper as being a respectable man who lived a “normal” life. What was he doing when he wasn’t stalking and “ripping”? He was eating, sleeping, strolling, traveling in taxis and on trains and steamships, attending music halls and the theater, reading, writing journal and newspaper articles and an avalanche of letters, drawing, painting, making himself the center of attention and hobnobbing with whomever he fancied.

He tolerated rich upper-class “snobs” if he could use them. He adored spying on the wretches of the slums if they fueled his dark, violent fantasies. He craved accolades and the company of celebrities. In later life he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Reading University. He would give painting lessons to Winston Churchill. His art hung in royal palaces. He inspired biographies and was honored with commemorative plaques on the sides of buildings he once inhabited.

It’s hard to envision Jack the Ripper as a workingman, a husband or a human being for that matter. We don’t think of him as admired and emulated, as having peers, friends and family. It’s very difficult to imagine him as a brilliant artist whom England continues to revere and calls its own. It wasn’t a popular thing for me to do when I concluded that this fabled Victorian killer was the former actor, painter and writer Sickert, who lived a long, respectable life.

By the time he died in 1942 there were many books and films about his evil alias. I feel sure he read and watched anything related to the Ripper. I have good reason to suspect that when Sickert was old and becoming demented, he bragged about the atrocities he’d committed. It’s possible that by then, when he was a heavy drinker “in his dotage,” as one close to him put it, the response was to shush him and send him off to bed. I doubt anyone believed him. If they did, the ugly stories were swept under the rug.

There’s no statute of limitations on homicide, although in this instance there isn’t anyone left to bring to justice. Except me. I’ve continued to interrogate myself ever since my conclusions became public. What did I miss the first time? What mistakes did I make? What might I say or do differently more than a decade after the fact? What if I was wrong?

Since I began this work almost half of my career ago, the coldest of cold cases has gotten a lot warmer. In fact I’d call it hot. After more than thirteen years of additional analyses and discoveries, I can say with confidence that what propelled the Ripper’s violent impulses makes more sense with time.

I don’t forgive the pain and death he caused, but I better understand why he was driven to it—as much as anyone can understand such a thing. I would go so far as to say that some of what the Ripper perpetrated upon others wasn’t as awful as what was done to him.

The Ripper’s victims include himself. Whether it was five or fifty people he slaughtered before his spree finally ended, he will always be that one additional casualty few people think about. Genetics aside, he didn’t enter this world with the intention of leaving behind such carnage. I doubt he set out wanting to be the most infamous killer in history. I suspect he would have preferred to be known as an artistic master like Degas, Turner and of course Whistler, the man Sickert admired, resented and despised.

His must have been a miserable existence. I don’t quite feel sorry for him, but I’m more sympathetic than I was. Frankly, I used to hate him. I don’t anymore.

I’ve been asked, “If you could meet him, would you?” Absolutely. I would travel back in time for that. I’d put him through a metal detector, and I wouldn’t turn my back on him, but I fear I might have liked Walter Sickert. He could be devastatingly attractive, entertaining and charming. People were eager to be in his circle. He exploited, belittled and mocked his friends and benefactors even as they offered him their love and loyalty. He was a baffling chameleon. He was witty. He was fascinating and flamboyant. He was too damn brilliant and wily to be caught.

Some of my critics have said that the Ripper is an obsession for me. A more accurate description is that what began as simple curiosity took on an intensely dark life of its own. Going after him is as dark as it gets.

Was Sickert a mean-spirited practical jokester and a hoaxster? Did he live a lie? The answer to both is an undisputed “yes.” But did that make him the most notorious serial killer of all time? I’ll let you deliberate and decide. But do so cautiously and with the respect that these violent deaths deserve. To loosely quote Chaucer, if you must eat with a fiend, use a long spoon.

1

IN LATE 2001, I was having dinner in New York City’s Upper East Side and doing my best to appear composed and in a relaxed mood. The truth is, I was unsettled, maybe as unsettled as I’d ever been about a commitment I’d made.

I don’t remember much about that night, not even the restaurant where a group of us ate. I vaguely recall that Lesley Stahl told an intriguing story about her latest investigation for 60 Minutes, and everyone at the table was talking politics and economics as Ground Zero continued to smolder. I was offering another writer encouragement, citing my usual empowerment spiels and do-what-you-love lines. But I didn’t feel confident about my own career.

I was preoccupied with a project that I worried was going to ruin my life, a good life, a privileged one I never in my wildest dreams believed I’d have when I was growing up not-so-well-off in the foothills of North Carolina. My heart felt squeezed, my stomach hollow while I made pleasantries and chatty observations. I felt overwhelmed and full of dread as I said good night to friends and left with my literary agent, Esther Newberg.

On foot we headed toward our apartment buildings, just a street away from each other, and I had little to say. I was somber and distant on the dark sidewalk as we passed the usual suspects walking their dogs and the endless stream of loud people talking on cell phones. I barely noticed yellow cabs or horns as I began to imagine some thug trying to grab our briefcases or us. . . .

I envisioned myself chasing him, diving for his ankles and knocking him to the ground. I’m five foot four and weigh 125 pounds, and I can run fast, and I’d show him, hell yes I would. I fantasized about what I would do if some psychopathic piece of garbage came up from behind us in the dark and suddenly—

“How’s it going?” Esther asked.

“To tell you the truth . . .” I began hesitantly because I rarely was honest with her about my feelings.

It wasn’t my habit to admit to Esther or to my publisher at the time, Phyllis Grann, that I was ever uneasy or remotely insecure about what I was doing. I didn’t want to let them know I was sorry about the contract I’d just signed. The two women were the big shots in my professional life and had faith in me. If I said I was investigating Jack the Ripper and believed I knew who he was, they didn’t doubt me for a moment.

“I’m miserable,” I confessed.

“You are?” Esther’s stop-for-nothing stride hesitated for a moment on Lexington Avenue. “You’re miserable? Really? Why?”

“I don’t want to do this. I want to write my novels. I don’t know how the hell . . . All I did was look at his paintings and his life and those letters, and one thing led to another . . .”

I explained to her that the Ripper investigation pulls you in like a black hole and then you can’t get out. It turns you into antimatter, causes nonexistence, is the most dangerous awful thing I’ve ever done or words to that effect. Esther remained silent as I vented. I felt I was losing my life to Walter Sickert at a time when I was at the top of my game as an internationally successful crime novelist. He was stealing my charmed existence from me.

“I’m already exhausted by all this,” I said to Esther. “And I’ve not even started writing yet.”

2

THE RIPPER MAY BE DEAD, but he’s not gone. From the first moment I began this work, I sensed an entity, a terrifically negative energy that when invoked causes strange aberrations of physics.

There were the electrical disturbances, the crazy computer malfunctions, the sudden floods, fog banks and wildfires. On one occasion, winds were so fierce we couldn’t open the door of the jet that just landed us in Cornwall, England, where a mysterious man in uniform examined our passports. The next day we were confronted by immigration police in London who claimed we’d entered the country illegally. There was no agent who’d greeted us in Cornwall, we were told. The police didn’t know what on earth we were talking about.

The weirdness was never-ending. It usually manifested itself with a vengeance when something promising was imminent, such as the discovery of a nineteenth-century guest book signed and vandalized by “Jack the Ripper,” or a critically important watermark or a positive presumptive test that indicated the possible presence of human blood on a Jack the Ripper letter. Doors opened and slammed, and windows flew up on their own. A glass vase crashed to the floor as if a pair of angry hands had done it.

On one occasion an enormous “JR” appeared in the sand at the foot of my dock at a beachfront home where I was anonymous and in seclusion working on the book. Then I was forced to flee when the burglar alarm hammered as a door blew open and rain soaked through the walls of the office where I kept all my research. Such odd and inexplicable phenomena were witnessed by other people. Some of them weren’t eager to travel with me anymore.

When I began rewriting the book in 2012, the weirdness started in again with a fury. Electronic glitches and software failures. Important research items vanishing and then reappearing in the oddest places. Accidents. Health scares. My Ripper archivist’s house was struck by lightning and caught on fire. Other people working on my team began experiencing the “haunted happenings” of footsteps on upper floors and opening and shutting of doors—when no one was there.

From its inception this project has had bad karma. The early morning when Esther and Phyllis were on the phone concluding the contract negotiations, the first plane flew into the World Trade Center. The deal was sealed on 9-11 as the world changed forever. It surprises people when I confess that working this case has been grim and grueling. I’ve never been the obsessive Ripper crime buster that I’m reputed to be.

I’ve never thought, Wow, how cool it would be if I solved the Jack the Ripper case. It doesn’t even feel like it was my idea. I’ve explained repeatedly over the years that it seems the Ripper picked me and not the other way around. For some reason I was meant to do this but I wasn’t a willing recruit. That’s one reason I put off this revision for more than a decade.

“I don’t want to write about him,” I said to Esther as we walked back to our apartments that December night in 2001. “There’s no joy in this. None.”

“Well, you know,” she said calmly, “you don’t have to do it. I can get you out of it.”

She could have, but I could never have gotten myself out of it. I’ve been asked countless times if I regret writing this book. Do I wish I’d run as fast and far as I could in the opposite direction? My answer will always be the same. To not do it would feel wrong. It would feel cowardly. From almost the start I believed I knew the identity of the murderer. I couldn’t possibly look the other way.

“I’m suddenly in a position of judgment,” I told Esther as we neared our buildings. “Every now and then this small voice asks me, What if you’re wrong? I would never forgive myself for saying such a thing about somebody and then finding out I’m wrong.”

“But you don’t believe you’re wrong. . . .”

“No,” I said. “Because I’m not.”

3

IT ALL BEGAN accidentally and without warning in May of 2001. I happened to be in London to promote the archaeological excavation of Jamestown when I was asked if I’d like to drop by New Scotland Yard for a tour.

“Not right now,” I said.

Even as I uttered those words I imagined how disappointed my readers might be. What would they think if they knew that sometimes I just don’t feel like touring one more police department, laboratory, morgue, firing range, cemetery, penitentiary, crime scene, law-enforcement agency or anatomical museum?

When I travel, especially abroad, my key to the city is often an invitation to visit its violent, sad sights. In Buenos Aires I was given a proud tour of a crime museum that included a host of executed criminals’ decapitated heads preserved inside glass boxes. Only the most notorious made it into this gruesome gallery, and they’d gotten what was coming to them, I supposed as they stared back at me with milky eyes.

In the northwestern Argentinian city of Salta, I was shown five-hundred-year-old mummies of Inca children who had been buried alive to please the gods. I still see their forlorn faces. It was as if they knew what was happening to them. Then there was the time in London when I was given VIP treatment in a plague pit where one could scarcely move in the mud without stepping on human bones.

In Rome I was invited to meet a forensic pathologist who had embalmed a pope. Not so long ago I was invited back to Jamestown to see the skull of a fourteen-year-old girl cannibalized by starving colonists in 1609. I can’t drop by Knoxville, Tennessee, without being asked if I want to take a spin through the Body Farm, where bodies donated to science lie about in various states of undress and rot. A crime scene investigator’s idea of a gift to me was a maggot in a vial of formalin, and then there are the offers of where to take me to lunch as bits of organs and innards are dropped into a plastic bucket under the autopsy table.

I worked in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia, for six years, programming computers, compiling statistical analyses and helping out in the morgue. I scribed for the forensic pathologists, weighed organs, wrote down trajectories and the sizes of wounds, inventoried the prescription drugs of suicide victims who wouldn’t take their antidepressants and helped strip the bodies of fully rigorous people who rigidly resisted our removing their clothes. I labeled 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.

I don’t forget the faces or the details of people who are killed. I’ve seen so many. I couldn’t possibly count how many and wish I could fill a huge room with them before it happened. I would beg them to lock their doors or install an alarm system—or at least get a dog—or not park there or stay away from drugs or go see a psychiatrist or don’t get so damn drunk that you drop your house key in the snow and freeze to death.

I feel mournful when I envision the dented aerosol can of Brut deodorant in the pocket of the teenage boy who decided to show off by standing up in the back of a pickup truck at the exact moment his rowdy friends drove it under a bridge. I can’t comprehend the randomness of a man handed a metal-tipped umbrella as he got off a plane in a thunderstorm. I still see the singed hair of his temple and the burn on the bottom of his foot from lightning. I remember he was headed home to his young wife and kids.

My intense curiosity about violence hardened long ago into a suit of clinical armor that’s so heavy sometimes I can barely walk after visits with the dead. It seems they want my energy and desperately try to suck it out of me as they lie in their own blood on the street or the floor or on top of a stainless-steel table.

The dead stay dead and I stay drained. Murder isn’t a mystery and it’s my mission to fight it with my pen. So it would have been a betrayal of what I am and an insult to New Scotland Yard and every law enforcer everywhere for me to be “tired” the day I was told a private tour could be arranged.

“That’s very kind of Scotland Yard,” I replied. “I’ve never been there.”

4

THE NEXT MORNING, I met with Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Grieve, now retired but still the most respected investigator in Great Britain as far as I’m concerned.

As fate would have it, he’s an expert in Jack the Ripper’s crimes and we began to talk about them in his office. I confessed that the notorious Victorian killer interested me mildly, but I’d never read a book about him. I knew nothing about his homicides, I told John. I wasn’t even aware that the victims were prostitutes or of how they died, I admitted. Then I asked a few questions. Perhaps I could use New Scotland Yard in my next Scarpetta forensic thriller, I suggested. If so I would need to know factual details about the Ripper cases, and perhaps Scarpetta would have fresh forensic insights about them.

John offered to take me on a tour of the Ripper crime scenes—what was left of them after more than a hundred years. I canceled a trip to Ireland to spend the rainy, cold morning of May 4, 2001, with John and Detective Inspector Howard Gosling. We walked about Whitechapel and Spitalfields, and on to Mitre Square, and then to what was formerly known as Miller’s Court, where Ripper victim Mary Kelly was flayed to the bone.

For hours John went into great detail about the women who were slaughtered, and finally I asked him about the suspects. He dismissed the usual ones as “bull” but did say he “would want to talk to [Montague] Druitt,” a young barrister who coached cricket at a boys’ school until he was suddenly fired in the fall of 1888. While he was alive, Druitt wasn’t a suspect in the Ripper’s murders. He had to commit suicide to earn that distinction.

In November or early December, soon after he lost his job, he tucked rocks into the pockets of his overcoat and drowned himself in the Thames. “Sexually insane—alleged by his family,” John told me at the end of the tour when we were getting a bite to eat at the Charles Dickens Coffee House on Wellington Street. “Truth may never be known, may be in the bottom of the Thames . . .”

Then he had a suggestion for me. “There’s one other interesting chap you might want to check out as long as you’re going to look into it. An artist named Walter Sickert. He painted some murder pictures. In one of them in particular a clothed man is sitting on the edge of a bed with the body of the nude prostitute he just murdered. It’s called The Camden Town Murder. I’ve always wondered about him.”

5

WALTER SICKERT was connected with Jack the Ripper long before I appeared on the scene. I’m not the first one to think of him. But I’m the first to investigate him the same way we would a suspect today.

He was never a person of interest at the time of the Ripper’s crimes, at least as far as anybody seems to know. Other than in a few peculiar anecdotes recorded by those who knew Sickert, he wasn’t connected with the Ripper. This changed in August of 1973 when a British artist and picture framer named Joseph Gorman went public about Sickert’s alleged involvement in the Royal Conspiracy.

Three years later in 1976, Stephen Knight published Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. In 1990, Jean Overton Fuller published her investigation into Sickert as Jack the Ripper, and the escalation continued. In December 1993, the Daily Express published an article claiming that Sickert’s handwriting had been linked to Ripper letters: “Compelling new evidence suggests that Jack the Ripper was a famous and respected society painter. A top graphologist claims to have matched up handwriting samples by artist Walter Sickert and the killer. . . .”

Soon enough the art world began to take an uncomfortable look at the “roi,” or king, as he was called by his devotees. In 1996, a book by Sickert art expert Anna Robins created a flurry of news stories linking his art to violence. He was obsessed with the Ripper murders and with “perversion and mutilation,” Dr. Robins said in a Times interview.

Not familiar with what had preceded me, I began looking into all this and got an uneasy feeling instantly when I opened a book of Sickert art. The first plate I saw was an 1887 painting of the well-known Victorian performer Ada Lundberg at the Marylebone Music Hall. She’s supposed to be singing. To me it looks as if she’s screaming while menacing men in the audience leer at her.

I’m sure there are sound artistic explanations for all of Sickert’s works. But what I see is morbidity, violence and a hatred of women. When I’ve visited galleries such as the Fogg and the Courtauld, I can find his paintings at a glance. The wall where they hang is the darkest spot in the room. It’s as if his art absorbs all light.

During the early years of this investigation, I acquired more than one hundred of his prints, sketches and paintings. I hung some of them in my house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and quickly discovered that I didn’t enjoy the company I was keeping. A Sickert self-portrait seemed to reveal an inner malignancy. A portrait of his third wife, Thérèse Lessore, hinted of ribs gleaming through the reddish fabric of her dress. In Putana a Casa, a prostitute is seated in a chair, and red paint dripping from underneath her skirt to the floor is reminiscent of blood. None of these stayed on my walls for long.

From the beginning of my research on Sickert and the Ripper, I began to see unsettling parallels. Some of his art bears a chilling resemblance to mortuary and scene photographs of Ripper victims. I noticed murky images of clothed men reflected in mirrors inside gloomy bedrooms where nude women sit on iron bedsteads. I saw a diabolically creative mind, and I saw evil as I began adding layer after layer of circumstantial and physical evidence.

In 2002, some fifteen months after my first meeting with New Scotland Yard’s John Grieve, I sat down with him and presented the case. “What would you do had you known all this and been the detective back then?” I asked.

He said he would immediately put Sickert under surveillance in an effort to discover “where his bolt holes [secret rooms] were, and if we found any we would get search warrants. If we didn’t get any more evidence than what we’ve now got,” he summarized as we drank coffee in an East End Indian restaurant, “we’d be happy to put the case before the crown prosecutor.”

6

I FOUND OUT the hard way that it wasn’t a popular position for me to take when I decided to depict a respected British artist as a serial killer. The rumblings of the earthquake began early on.

John Lessore, a nephew of Sickert’s third wife, sent me an angry letter, complaining that my interviews of him in 2001 were deceptive. I no doubt added insult to injury in my January 7, 2002, response to him: “I would hope, John, that if you or yours have any Sickert personal items which could be significant that you would consider helping rather than condemning what I am doing. But I understand your feelings and sincerely regret hurting yours. If you feel deceived, I am sorry, but I did try to tell you I thought your uncle was a bad man. . . .”

I assumed Lessore’s reaction would be the exception rather than the rule, but that wasn’t to be the case. When my book debuted in the winter of 2002 and I was heading to the U.K. for the publicity tour, I was baffled to hear reports from FBI friends that “the Ripperologists are lying in wait for you.” Apparently this was based on postings on the Internet, and I thought it all ridiculous, not quite sure who these Ripperologists were. I joked that their threat brought to mind Klingons in formation ready to fire upon the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Fire away my critics did, and my book tour in the U.K. was pretty damn awful. Afterwards I described it to my publicists as “a ten-day deposition.” I was attacked and probably didn’t handle it very well. In hindsight I was just as guilty of assumptions and prejudices as the Ripperologists were. I completely dismissed their theories as fanciful and meritless, as they did with mine.

This was made quite clear when Ripper expert Keith Skinner reached out with a personal letter. It was dated October 6, 2006, although I didn’t get it until many months later as he’d sent it to Richmond, where I hadn’t lived for six years. As best I know, his was the first direct communication I’d ever gotten from a Ripperologist, and Keith was quite blunt in his opinion that I was “wrong” not to have “met or spoken” to Jean Overton Fuller or to the late Joseph Gorman, who was convinced Sickert was his biological father.

Keith was correct: I’d never made a concerted effort to talk to either of these people. But I had my reasons based on experience. After communications with Ms. Fuller in 2002, I decided not to meet with her or include her in the Omnibus Stalking the Ripper documentary I was filming for the BBC. I was especially wary of Joseph. He was one of the biggest sources of information that led to the Royal Conspiracy, which had always struck me as utter nonsense. I decided to avoid him completely when I called him and he answered his phone, “Royal Palace.” I instantly hung up and didn’t try again.

I remember reading Keith Skinner’s letter in Concord, Massachusetts, where I lived at the time, and saying to my partner, Staci, “I’m not sure what to do about this. The last thing I want is to tangle with Ripperologists.” But I did some soul-searching. Maybe I did have mistakes in my book, I mused to her. Maybe I overlooked certain people and details.

On May 2, 2007, I replied to Keith by email that I would meet with Jean Overton Fuller. I explained why I’d avoided doing so while I was filming the Omnibus documentary and also finishing my book:

“I would be happy to meet [her] with you as I think her information (although ‘hearsay’) is fascinating. That was my wish, to quote her rendition of it as it comes directly from her vs. her book. As I recall, she wouldn’t allow me to do that without going into her ‘theory’ as opposed to mine, and added to that, she had to see the MS and approve what I wrote about her and what she said.”

7

ON OCTOBER 4, 2007, I met her in the small village of Wymington, where she lived in a stone and brick cottage climbing with red ivy and roses.

She was ninety-two, dressed that day in a colorful cardigan and green slacks. I found her elegant and extraordinarily articulate, and I was keenly interested if not perplexed by the story I’d come to hear, which in 1990 was the basis of her book Sickert and the Ripper Crimes.

We sat in a living room comfortably cluttered with books and art, and she began to tell me about her mother Violet’s encounter in France with artist Florence Pash, a close friend and confidante of Walter Sickert’s. Jean Overton Fuller wasn’t sure exactly when this took place, but she was a young girl at the time, and she remembered her mother returning to London, “bubbling over with information.”

As I took notes in my journal, Ms. Fuller went on to explain that Florence Pash had told “the most amazing story” about having just been with Sickert, who shocked and frightened her with what he confided. “He said he knew who Jack the Ripper was,” Ms. Fuller recalled, “and that he could never get out of his mind the dreadful bleeding corpses. I was very puzzled by this. How did he come to see the dreadful bleeding corpses? If he saw all of the bleeding corpses, that makes him Jack the Ripper.”

Sickert went on to tell Ms. Pash that a member of the Royal Family “in direct line to the throne” had an illegitimate child he deserted. The implication was this royal deserter was Prince Eddy, the Duke of Clarence. The mother of this child, whose name Ms. Fuller didn’t reveal, deposited her infant daughter on Sickert’s doorstep, so to speak, asking him to keep an eye on the little girl in his studio while he painted.

As the story unfolds, eventual Ripper victim Mary Kelly was working as a tobacconist’s assistant in a shop across the street, and she suggested that Sickert should confront the Royal Family. “If he was good enough to bring the child up, he should get some money for it,” were Ms. Fuller’s words that I wrote down in my journal. “He [Sickert] did say Mary Kelly was as good as telling him to blackmail the Royal Family, which he had no intention of doing.”

Sickert supposedly paid a visit to the palace and took up the matter with Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria’s physician, who would become a Ripper “suspect” when the Royal Conspiracy theory became big news in the late 1970s. What’s fascinating about this detail is that Sickert’s mother, Eleanor, knew Dr. Gull, and I’m not aware that this fact has emerged before now.

In an undated letter she wrote to her close friend Pennie Muller, Eleanor expresses concern about either her husband or one of her sons, both named Oswald, and she says, “Sir W. Gull has given me much comfort—he says that Oswald is absolutely without disease in any organ & the pain of the neuralgia is all there is in the matter. . . . Your loving friend, Nell.”

Walter Sickert would have been familiar with Sir William Gull. Sickert would have known who he was, and likely knew him personally. I find the link significant since it was Joseph Gorman who connected the name Gull with the Ripper crimes in a story published by Stephen Knight (December 7, 1973, East London Advertiser). Joseph claimed it was his alleged father, Walter Sickert, who had told him about Gull, and these words gain new meaning when one realizes Sickert knew Gull or at least knew of him.

It seems that Sickert also mentioned Gull to Florence Pash, supposedly telling her that his most famous series of paintings and etchings, titled Ennui, feature a gull on Queen Victoria’s shoulder as a clue. (Most art experts see neither a gull nor Queen Victoria in Ennui, and I didn’t either when I looked at a version of it at the Tate Britain.)

Ms. Fuller explained to me that the reason Sickert gave Ms. Pash for his divulging such a fantastic and shocking story was he wanted the truth “known but not during his lifetime.” To prove his point, Sickert supposedly showed Ms. Pash a number of “murder paintings that he later burned,” Ms. Fuller told me. She added, “It makes no sense” that her mother would make up such a story.

Maybe Violet Overton Fuller didn’t make it up. Maybe Florence Pash didn’t either, although I don’t believe that a conspiracy explains why women were being slaughtered in the late summer and fall of 1888 and probably well beyond. Sexual homicides don’t fit with an elaborate explanation that sounds like a violent fairy tale involving a royal palace, a prince and a love child left in the care of strangers.

But I don’t doubt that Sickert might have told the story he did to Florence Pash. I don’t doubt he might have brainwashed the young Joseph Gorman with a similar tale, and it’s important to realize that Ms. Pash and Joseph couldn’t have gotten these stories from each other. The two of them weren’t acquainted. She died in 1951, more than half a century before he did.

Sickert might have confabulated such a myth because it allowed him to obsess covertly about what he didn’t dare confess in the open. His fanciful yarns also gave meaning, motive and even nobility to his base, cowardly crimes. Certainly the Ripper liked to believe he was actually doing the world a favor by ridding it of “vermin,” as he put it. In his mind, his victims were “whores” who got what they deserved.

8

I ALSO DON’T DOUBT that Joseph Gorman believed what he claimed. His widow, Edna, remains convinced that he was telling the truth about who he believed his real father was.

When I visited her in her Kentish Town home and spoke to her on the phone as late as 2013, she shared Joseph’s boyhood stories of visits with Sickert. “He went to Walter Sickert’s home many times,” she said, explaining that Joseph called him “Teethy because he had large teeth.” She added that Sickert also would visit young Joseph at the Gorman home on Drummond Street.

I suggested to Edna that the only way to prove the true identity of her late husband would be to conduct the same sort of genetic testing that was used on skeletal remains discovered in a grave outside Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2007. Scientists with the United States Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) proved the bones were those of two Romanov children murdered by a Bolshevik firing squad.

During my visit to the Gorman home in 2007, Edna presented a possible source of her late husband’s DNA, an old bloodstain of his on a favorite jacket he had worn. A DNA scientist removed the stain, an effort that proved to be futile due to contamination.

There likely won’t be a way to establish the absolute truth about Joseph’s ancestral claims. But it was obvious when I was with his family that they had no hesitation about using any means possible to “prove” Joseph was Walter Sickert’s son. There are other tenuous connections between Sickert and Joseph Gorman that only add to the intrigue.

Among Joseph’s papers was a statement dated September 19, 1989, that had accompanied a check for £154.88 from a literary agency. The payment was a permission fee and a 50 percent share of an advance due to Joseph for the use and paperback release of A Free House!, a compilation of Walter Sickert’s writings edited by Osbert Sitwell. The book originally was published in 1947, and one has to wonder how it’s possible Joseph Gorman was entitled to any revenues from it.

On March 10, 2005, the literary agency involved provided a written explanation: “It is our understanding that Joseph Sickert was Walter Sickert’s son and inherited the copyright in his father’s work. . . . Our original contact for the Estate was Walter Sickert’s widow. Our files indicate that we received instruction in 1989 that future income was to go to Joseph Sickert so presumably it was at that point that he inherited copyrights.”

A spokesperson for that agency, which requested anonymity, would later state in October 2012 that the source of this original directive can’t be clarified. Maybe the instruction came from the Sickert estate. Maybe it came from Joseph Gorman or from someone else. Perhaps adding to the mystery is Sickert’s 1926 drawing of an infant in a pram. The title is Boy Jos, which presumably is short for “Joseph.” Joseph Gorman would have been one at the time. He was born in Camden Town in 1925.

9

I’VE YET TO LOCATE any documentation about Florence Pash’s visit with Sickert in France.

Perhaps there are no letters that would verify Jean Overton Fuller’s recollections. But certainly she isn’t the only one who has relayed odd and disturbing memories of Sickert’s behavior.

In a letter from Paris dated November 16, 1968, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, a well-known artist with connections to the Bloomsbury Group, wrote one of Sickert’s biographers, Denys Sutton, that he’d known Walter Sickert since around 1930. Segonzac had very clear recollections of Sickert’s claiming to have “lived” in Whitechapel in the same house where Jack the Ripper had lived, and that Sickert had told him “spiritedly about the discreet and edifying life of this monstrous assassin.”

Sickert apparently also told friends he’d once stayed in a house where the landlady claimed Jack the Ripper lived during the early crimes. Supposedly he was a sickly veterinary student who eventually was whisked off to an asylum, and Sickert said he wrote down the name in a copy of Casanova’s memoirs he happened to be reading at the time. But alas, the book allegedly was destroyed in World War II.

In an undated letter to artist William Rothenstein, English writer Osbert Sitwell mentions something similar:

I am writing an essay on Sickert, and editing his papers—Years ago he told me the story of how he had occupied rooms in which previously Jack-the-Ripper (a young vetnerary [sic] surgeon) had lived. His landlady had told him the name of the murderer but Sickert could not remember it. . . . He added “At the time she told me, I was reading a volume, in French, of Casanova’s memoirs, which Will Rothenstein had leant me. I jotted the name down in pencil on the margin of one of the pages—and afterwards forgot about it, and returned the book to him. . . . One day, ask him if he still has it. . . . If he has, that’s the name of Jack-the-Ripper!!”

Probably it has long ago been borrowed or stolen? . . . But if not, it wd [sic] be very interesting. . . . If you are too busy to remember I shall perfectly understand.

Yrs [sic] ever Osbert Sitwell

Christopher Hassall’s biography of Winston Churchill’s private secretary Edward Marsh recounts a bizarre dinner conversation with Sickert: “He told me that it was he who gave Marie Lowndes the idea of The Lodger. His landlady had been Jack the Ripper’s—and if he hadn’t gone to the dinner party where he sat next to her there would have been no novel, no play, no film!”

In a diary entry of March 9, 1923, Marie Lowndes gave a different explanation. She claimed to have written The Lodger after overhearing a man at a dinner party claim that his mother employed a butler and a cook who got married and kept lodgers. They were convinced that “Jack the Ripper had spent the night under their roof.” One is left to wonder if the man who told this story at the dinner party was Walter Sickert.

It’s indisputable that he was intrigued by—if not obsessed with—murder. In 1960, Helen Lessore, sister-in-law of his third wife, Thérèse Lessore, said in a radio interview that Sickert used to take her on taxi rides and show her a house where either “Crippen” or “Jack the Ripper” had lived.

Andrina Schweder made a similar comment in her October 20, 1976, letter to Stephen Knight. She recalled that Sickert was fascinated by Jack the Ripper, Dr. Hawley Crippen (accused of killing and dismembering his wife), and the Camden Town murders. Ms. Schweder also confided that in 1922, Sickert encouraged her eight-year-old daughter to read The Lodger.

His obsession with the Ripper isn’t coincidental, and his interest in the Crippen case might have been more than casual. It’s possible that he encountered the Crippens or was acquainted with them. In 1910 when Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen allegedly murdered his wife and hid her remains in the basement, Sickert had a studio at 142 Brecknock Road (now blocks of flats), barely one-third of a mile from Dr. Crippen’s house (which no longer exists) at 39 Hilldrop Crescent.

Mrs. Crippen also was a former singer with the stage name Belle Elmore and had appeared at the Collins Music Hall. Sickert was no stranger to the Collins. One of his greatest sources of artistic inspiration was the bawdy music halls he frequented. As an interesting footnote, recent DNA testing conducted by forensic scientists in Michigan on microscopic biological evidence from the Crippen case indicates the human remains police discovered in the basement weren’t Cora Crippen’s. In fact they were from a male.

Sickert’s circle of colleagues and friends was aware of his fixation on the macabre and that he seemed to talk about Jack the Ripper a little too much. Sickert included the notorious name in at least one of his works of art (Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, circa 1906). Sickert was known to act out murder and mock real cases of it. He was witnessed stepping into a murderer’s character while he painted, and such antics likely were viewed by his fans, friends and apologists as nothing more than the unpredictable artist’s typical flair for drama. But were they?

If anyone in Sickert’s close circle of friends and fellow artists suspected his obsession with violence might have manifested itself in actual acts of it, no one talked while he was alive, it seems. Some descendants of people who knew him well still aren’t talking. During the reworking of this book, certain estates in control of copyrights denied me permission to quote from the documents or include related photographs.

I found this a bit of a shock since the documents are part of collections donated to universities or government offices, ostensibly because the original owner or author wished to make his or her papers available for study. The thought of Sickert as the Ripper seems to make a number of people uncomfortable. Sickert himself certainly talked openly about the Ripper. He bragged, confabulated, spun wild tales and theories that clearly were inspired by whatever fed his sexually violent fantasies.

Why would he script such outrages? Was he a twisted joker who created the greatest horror show on earth that likely will endure for centuries more? Or was he a vicious killer whose savage acts were driven by malignant compulsions he couldn’t control?

10

MY MOTIVE for taking on this case can best be summarized by a practical question I asked at the very start: “What if modern science were applied?”

I never imagined my efforts would be ridiculed and resented. With time and careful reexamination, I admit I initially made minor errors in London geography, the spelling of names, and some dates and a few minor facts. I was guilty of an anachronism or two, and yes, typos. Worst of all, I fell into the trap of being a bit too adamant.

That wasn’t wise. People don’t appreciate being told what to believe, especially if it’s by an American crime novelist who probably came across as too sure of herself. Even so, the vitriol my book inspired upon its initial release in the U.S. and the U.K. was an ambush I didn’t expect. I never saw it coming, and I should have.

On a chilly London night in 2002, John Grieve said to me, “You know you will be hated for this, Patricia.”

As I make my revised case against Sickert, it’s only fair I include the case against me. I will briefly mention the most vocal criticisms and accusations:

CRITICISM: I supposedly ripped up a Walter Sickert canvas for no good reason.

FACT: I actually didn’t rip up one for any reason.

But that hasn’t stopped people from making angry comments about it publicly. “I can’t believe she has done this,” said art historian Richard Shone (Guardian, December 8, 2001). “It all sounds monstrously stupid to me.”

In a letter to the editor of the Sunday Telegraph on December 8, 2002, Bernard Dunstan wrote: “Patricia Cornwell says that she ‘knows’ that Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper . . . and has cut up one of his pictures to help prove her point—oblivious, apparently, of the fact that he was perhaps the finest English artist of the last Century. . . . I suppose Miss Cornwell has to be allowed her theories but I do hope she does not find it necessary to cut any more paintings.”

This act of vandalism in the name of science or otherwise never happened, and I’ve been saying this for years. But no one seems to listen. When the Sickert painting in question was transported from London to the Richmond, Virginia, crime labs in 2001, the canvas arrived with a large hole in it. An ABC Primetime Live crew was filming a show on this case, and apparently it was incorrectly assumed the damage to the painting was due to some sort of scientific extraction.

On January 7, 2002, I addressed my alleged “monstrous stupidity” in a five-page letter I wrote to John Lessore after he accused me of the same thing:

Let me say that it is patently false that I destroyed a Sickert painting. In fact, the painting in question was sold to me . . . for some 27,000 [pounds] and flown by private jet back to the U.S. When it was unwrapped we were horrified to find a large hole punched through the middle of it. This painting did go to the labs but was only examined by non-destructive light sources. . . . What you should know however is that I would not hesitate to “cut up” a Sickert or anything else if it was the only way to expose a terrible crime and ensure justice. No work of art is worth as much as a human life. . . .

CRITICISM: Sickert couldn’t have murdered anyone, because he has an alibi. He was in France in the late summer and fall when the early Ripper crimes began.

FACT: This is patently untrue.

Sickert may have been in France often, but he wasn’t away from London when every Ripper murder occurred. Sickert’s own music-hall sketches in pencil on small pieces of cheap notepaper place him in London’s East End at music halls within days or even hours of at least three killings associated with the Ripper.

Dates he wrote on such sketches place him in London on August 4 and 5, and Ripper victim Martha Tabram was stabbed thirty-nine times close to midnight on August 6 or possibly the first few hours of the next morning. Another music-hall sketch is dated September 30, when the Ripper committed the double murder of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes.

CRITICISM: The DNA testing done in this case proved to be worthless.

FACT: It would be more accurate to say that the analysis probably shouldn’t have been done at all.

When forensic scientists swabbed Sickert and Ripper-related envelopes and stamps for the first time in 2001, we didn’t know what we do now about the hazards of extracting mitochondrial DNA, much less nuclear DNA from evidence that was inadequately stored and is extremely fragile. It’s one thing to scrub a dirty bone or tooth and extract a clean DNA sample. It’s quite another to rid old paper and cloth of contaminants.

As mitochondrial DNA expert Dr. Terry Melton summarized in 2012, “The Ripper and Sickert [documents] . . . had been handled multiple times by unknown individuals, each of whom likely left a skin cell or two on the surfaces. Confounding this was the actual age of the original handler’s DNA, which would certainly be degraded and less recoverable than the highly intact modern DNA laid on the surfaces by modern handlers.” Nonetheless, I tried multiple rounds of DNA testing, finally giving up for good in 2008.

I don’t agree that the early results are completely irrelevant. They reflect what was found under the circumstances, and while certain matches we got might be significant, we’ll never know for sure. As Dr. Melton explained in 2012, mitochondrial DNA analysis isn’t reliable “unless biological materials [can] be washed and bleached to remove all contaminating modern DNA that had been introduced.”

But priceless documents can’t be washed and bleached. Any attempts at swabbing Ripper-related or Sickert archival materials were a gamble, and what we ultimately got wouldn’t be accepted as reliable in court. This is precisely the reason I have grave doubts about a recent claim that DNA proves Jack the Ripper was a Polish immigrant named Aaron Kosminski. The origin of this genetic evidence is a large piece of blue silk material described as a “shawl” that purportedly was found with the mutilated body of Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes.

The first insurmountable problem is that no such article of clothing or anything similar to this “shawl” is referenced in the original documentation about any of the Ripper’s murders. There’s no such detail listed in police reports, and a crime scene sketch made while the body was still at the scene doesn’t show a shawl—certainly not one seven or eight feet long and made out of blue silk. (I’ve heard that it looks more like a decorative table runner than a shawl.)

I don’t blame anyone for testing an item that maybe—just maybe—was associated with the Ripper case. But in fact there doesn’t seem to be a proven provenance of this segment of cloth, which has been handled by countless people over the years. I personally know of at least two individuals who tell me they examined it and weren’t wearing gloves. Who else did? Unless the DNA analysis withstands the peer review of forensic scientists, we really can’t consider the results credible.

CRITICISM: The forensic analysis of documents in this case has no merit.

FACT: This is completely untrue and baseless.

From 2001 through 2007, I utilized top forensic scientists and art experts to examine the original letters and telegrams preserved at the National Archives and the London Metropolitan Archives. It was determined that quite a number of these rude, crude, violent communications appear to be written by the same intelligent, artistic individual.

This person painted a letter with a brush in gorgeous calligraphy, sketched cartoons and wrote rhyming couplets. Under magnification, what appears to be a sketch of a Neanderthal is actually an intricate woodblock print. Then there are the paper and watermark matches made in comparisons of Sickert and Ripper letters. These results are statistically significant.

One reason detractors have hammered away at the forensic paper analysis is that expert Peter Bower didn’t publish his findings. He has a good explanation for this that critics have failed to mention. In earlier years, Peter was hamstrung by copyright restrictions pertaining to Sickert art and documents. Publishing a journal article about forensic paper comparisons isn’t possible if no images can be displayed.

It’s quite compelling to superimpose watermarks in Ripper and Sickert letters and see the results for oneself. In the instance of a fine stationery with a Gurney Ivory Laid watermark, for example, five pieces of paper (three from Sickert correspondence, two from the Ripper) came from a paper run of only twenty-four possible sheets.

CRITICISM: The handwriting doesn’t match.

FACT: Better to say that handwriting comparison has been unhelpful in this case.

Handwriting analysis isn’t an exact science like trace evidence, DNA, fingerprints or toxicology. People can alter their handwriting, and there’s ample evidence that the Ripper did. He even admitted it, boasting that he could write in “five hands,” and Sickert’s known handwriting is unusual and dramatically inconsistent. At times his penmanship is so wild and sloppy, it’s almost impossible to decipher. It varies as much as the many ways he signed his name.

Close inspection certainly reveals oddities and contradictions that indicate some Ripper letters were deliberately disguised to look like the work of the illiterate or deranged. Misspellings in particular are a red flag. The language used is another. All of these details begin to form the profile of a violent, mocking, arrogant and cunning creator. Even when the Ripper would have us believe he’s a primitive brute, his intelligence glints. He can’t help himself.

CRITICISM: Sickert was a womanizer whose first wife divorced him for adultery. He had no sexual dysfunction. The surgeries he endured as a child were unrelated to his penis.

FACT: We honestly don’t know anything about Sickert’s sex life.

There’s no absolute indication he ever fathered children, and we don’t know if he really committed adultery or if that simply was the excuse his first wife needed so that she could end the marriage legally. Women who knew him well made no reference I could find to his being adulterous, inappropriate or even flirtatious.

It’s possible his early surgeries left him with scar tissue and strictures that could have made it difficult or impossible to have an erection or engage in intercourse. Maybe he was able to function normally. I don’t think we’re ever going to know, and in the final analysis I don’t believe it matters. The greatest damage done to him in those nightmarish operating theaters is what the gruesome experiences did to his psyche.

I continue to marvel over the current adamancy that the “fistula” written about in Sickert biographies was a deformity of the rectum. During my first visit with his nephew John Lessore, I asked him about this fistula, and without hesitation he described it as “a hole in [Sickert’s] penis.” Since my visit to Lessore’s studio in July of 2001, the story has been twisted to imply that either he misspoke or I misheard the comment or made it up.

I know what I wrote in my research journal at the time: “W.S. had a fistula of the penis according to his nephew John, who was a lovely man.” I underlined lovely twice. “I bought 5 of his [John Lessore’s] paintings—they are gentle and kind as he is. Of course he says W.S. in addition to being such a marvelous and important artist absolutely was not J the R. I also got a book with W.S. notes and a WS [sic] painting table.”

This conversation was witnessed by my then chief of staff Irene Shulgin, and on November 25, 2007, she and I exchanged emails about it. “We were in John’s studio, he was in his wheelchair, and I asked him about Sickert’s fistula,” I wrote to her, “and he literally jumped in—almost interrupted me—and said, ‘he had a hole in his penis.’ ” Irene emailed back to me, “I remember the meeting with John Lessore the same way you did. We were both shocked by the way he just came out with the information. Like it was old news.”

I don’t think John Lessore assigned any great significance to what he said to me that summer day when we were having such a pleasant chat. At the end of our visit, he suggested that I write a biography of his famous uncle. I did. But it wasn’t exactly what Lessore had in mind.

11

JACK THE RIPPER remains uniquely baffling and overwhelming—without a doubt the most frustrating and sensationalized murderer in criminal history. He very well may always hold that distinction. In fact, I hope so.

The world doesn’t need to be revisited by a similar offender, certainly not a crueler or more cunning one who manages to turn human tragedy into a high drama that trivializes the real suffering he has caused.

By now I’ve decided that the Ripper isn’t merely a case. The carnage he caused isn’t merely a series of homicides, no matter how many. He isn’t merely a killer but the spinner of an intricate web that includes and connects more than a century of British history and many of its people, from the “Unfortunates” he savaged to James McNeill Whistler to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Bram Stoker to Oscar Wilde to Queen Victoria and many others, and finally to New Scotland Yard. The descendants of its investigators must have considered the Ripper case a tragic failure.

If one ponders the context of the Ripper’s crimes, it’s eerie to note that at the very time they began in the summer of 1888, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was filling the London theaters. American actor Richard Mansfield played the starring role to sold-out houses at the Lyceum, owned by the Sir Laurence Olivier of the day, the famous actor Henry Irving.

When Sickert was a fledgling actor, he was an understudy in Irving’s traveling troupe for a while. It’s hard to imagine that Sickert didn’t attend Mansfield’s masterful dual performance as both Jekyll and Hyde. It was so convincing that the actor was suspected of being the Ripper, and Scotland Yard interrogated him.

There are striking similarities between Mr. Ripper and Mr. Hyde: inexplicable disappearances; different styles of handwriting; fog; disguises; secret dwellings where changes of clothing were kept; disguised build, height and walk. Through the symbolism in his novel, Stevenson gives us a remarkable early description of psychopathy. The good man Dr. Jekyll is in “bondage” to the mysterious Mr. Hyde, who is “a spirit of enduring evil.” After Hyde commits murder, he escapes through the dark streets, euphoric from his bloody deed. He’s already fantasizing about the next one.

Dr. Jekyll’s evil side is the “animal” that lives within him and feels no fear and relishes danger. It’s in this “second character” of Hyde where Dr. Jekyll’s mind becomes most nimble, his faculties “sharpened to a point.” As the beloved doctor transforms himself into Hyde, he becomes overwhelmed by rage and a lust to torture and murder whomever he comes upon and can overpower. “That child of hell had nothing human,” Stevenson writes.

Neither did Sickert when his “child of hell” replaced his paintbrush with a blade. The evidence both anecdotal and scientific continues to point to him. This doesn’t mean that anyone will ever prove he actually committed murder. Simply summarized, we can’t place him at a crime scene. But we might be able to place an artist at one. Evidence not noticed before now has revealed something baffling inside the room where Mary Kelly was butchered on November 9, 1888.

Her case in particular haunts me. Despite decades of autopsies and crime scenes, I can honestly say I’ve never encountered the extreme brutality shown in the only existing scene photographs from the Ripper case. It’s my suspicion she was attacked in her sleep after he reached through a broken window and unlocked her door. He cut her throat and spent considerable time removing body parts, including her face, as he began a dissection to the bone.

While this was going on, he kept a fire burning, possibly to light his evil way—and possibly he needed light for another reason. In 2001, the Kelly crime scene photographs were forensically processed to improve their clarity. It wouldn’t be until August 2012 that I would notice faint strange shapes or stains on the wall behind the bedstead.

The question immediately raised was whether these were images deliberately made by the killer, perhaps some sort of cartoonish, morbid art painted with Mary Kelly’s blood. Or were they what could be construed as face-like shapes caused by artifact and therefore not real? In the new work I will include images from the original forensic processing conducted in 2001 and more recent attempts in higher-resolution photographs.

I don’t tell people what to see. It’s completely subjective, rather much like finding Jesus in a stain on a shroud or in the clouds. Is it real or imagined? I don’t have a definitive answer, but repeated efforts by several forensic experts show that something unusual seems to be there. But barring an explanation I don’t yet have, I will let others decide what’s there or not.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the Ripper finally decided to sign his infernal art. Maybe then the police would have had a clue and it would have made the chase more interesting. But that would never happen, and by the time of Mary Kelly’s murder, the Ripper was getting frustrated.

“I think you all are asleep in Scotland Yard,” he complained. “You never caught me and you never will,” he boasted.

And he was right.

About the Author

PATRICIA CORNWELL is recognized as one of the world’s top bestselling crime authors, with novels translated into thirty-six languages in more than 120 countries. Her novels have won numerous prestigious awards including the Edgar, the Creasey, the Anthony, the Macavity, and the Prix du Roman d’Aventure. Beyond the Scarpetta series, Cornwell has written a definitive book about Jack the Ripper, a biography, and two more fiction series, among others. Cornwell, a licensed helicopter pilot and scuba diver, actively researches the cutting-edge forensic technologies that inform her work. She was born in Miami, grew up in Montreat, North Carolina, and now lives and works in Boston.

www.PatriciaCornwell.com

Twitter: @1pcornwell

Facebook.com/Patricia.Cornwell

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Preface

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

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11

About the Author