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PORTRAIT OF A KILLER: Jack the Ripper - Case closed
by Patricia Cornwell
G. P.Putnam's Sons, November 2002
387 pages
$27.95
ISBN: 0399149325


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

I am not one of those known as Ripperologists. I knew surprisingly little about the infamous Jack the Ripper case, and I learned a lot from Patricia Cornwell's book.

Cornwell is known for her mystery novels. In July 2002 I read her novel, Post Mortem, and gave it a short, but favorable review on the DorothyL list. Suspense important in mystery novels. An author reveals just so much at a time, sometimes going back and forth in chronology and other sequencing, hiding some details and embellishing others, so as to create a mystery and steer the reader to think the way the author wants.

Indeed, without this technique many fictional mysteries wouldn't be mysteries. This is not, however, an effective technique in expository non-fiction, which should be as clear as possible. Unfortunately in this book I don't find the facts set out in the clearest order.

For example, it begins by introducing famed artist Walter Sickert (1860-1942) and his idiosyncratic life style, but biographical data about him is scattered piecemeal throughout the book: in one instance I wanted to find out if Sickert was married when the first murder took place, but the book was nine-tenths over before I could learn yes, he was, with his marriage to Ellen Cobden occurring on June 10, 1885.

Cornwell became interested in this case in 2001 after talking to Scotland Yard's John Grieve, who considered Sickert a suspect. She has spent some six million dollars in a private investigation and concludes that Sickert was in fact guilty.

Among the many vicious murders in the great metropolis of Victorian London, those of six women, most of them down-and-out alcoholic prostitutes who were savagely mutilated near the disreputable area of Whitechapel in East London between August 7 and November 9 of 1888 were considered to be the work of a man known as Jack the Ripper, whose identity was never known.

Cornwell says he gave himself this name in letters to the police and others, although I have seen elsewhere that it was the newspapers that first used the name -- truthfully I don't know. At any rate, there were literally hundreds of these flippant, taunting letters mailed from all over, including foreign lands, purportedly coming from the killer, and Cornwell believes that most of them are genuine.

The police at the time did not; they considered all the letters to be hoaxes by a variety of writers in a variety of handwritings. Cornwell writes that an artist could have faked different handwritings.

An article dated November 9, 2002 in England's The Spectator magazine by Richard Shone titled 'Verdict as open as ever,' states that mention of Sickert as an accessory was made in a 1976 book by Stephen Knight, The Final Solution, based on words by Joseph Gorman Sickert, who claimed to be Sickert's illegitimate son.

A 1990 book by Jean Overton Fuller called Sickert the killer, based on what her mother had told her, her mother being Florence Pash, who knew Sickert well. Cornwell does not mention either book or author in the index of her Portrait of a Killer, nor does she include them in her otherwise extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Pash is in the index one time, and that reference shows only that Pash once anonymously bought a painting by Sickert.

I'm indebted to Barbara Franchi for telling me about a 1975 book, Jack the Ripper, considered by some to be the best book available on the Ripper case ­ this was written by Donald Rumbelow, who was once in charge of Scotland Yard's Black Museum and who came to conclusions that do not agree with Cornwell's. There is no mention either of this book in the bibliography or index of Cornwell's book.

Cornwell seems to have been thorough in her costly investigation. She used her own professional experience in forensic evidence and she hired qualified people in England and the US to check for DNA, fingerprints, unpublished records and other writings, interviews with people who knew Sickert, or others having to do with the case, and so on.

As a result, her book provides good data on the case and certainly will be referred to by students of these crimes for a long time. However, much of the book is dedicated to words like 'could have,' 'may have,' and 'might have,' as in 'Sickert's works of art may have contained clues.' What starts out as supposition can end up with more force than it actually deserves.

Sickert was known for his morbid paintings (something he shared in common with many other contemporary painters). One of his 1903 paintings shows a woman in Venice with eyes wide open, staring, and, so Cornwell writes, looking dead. Cornwell states that police photos of the body of 1888 victim Mary Ann Nichols had shown her with a staring, dead face.

Thus, Cornwell suggests, the similarity shows us that Sickert was either at the scene of the crime or somehow had access to the police investigation. A 1923 Sickert painting of Grover's Island includes a rising sun that Cornwell interprets as being 'almost identical' to a rising sun painted on the window of a London pub that Emily Dimmock used to visit; although the police did not make such a charge, Cornwell asserts that the Ripper was busy as a killer both before and long after 1888, and that Emily Dimmock in 1907 was another of his victims.

Cornwell writes, "The night watchman saw [victim Annie Chapman] last on Brushfield Street. Had she headed but a few blocks north on Commercial Street she would have reached Shoreditch, where there were several music halls . . . A little further north [one mile from Brushfield] was Hoxton . . . or the very route Walter Sickert sometimes took when he walked home [five miles away] to 54 Broadhurst Gardens after evenings at various music halls, theaters, or wherever he went on his obsessive wanderings late at night and in the early morning."

What is implied here? No one knows if Sickert was even in the area that night. The only connection really made is that Annie lived in East London, and Sickert sometimes walked to music halls in East London. On the other hand, there is strong evidence that Sickert was in France with family and friends on the day Annie Chapman was killed.

In the Spectator article mentioned above, Richard Shone writes that at the time of the second Ripper murder, August 31, 1888, and the third one, September 8, 1888, Sickert was with his mother and brother vacationing near Dieppe, France. The mother sent a letter (a letter not mentioned by Cornwell) to a friend that her sons Walter and Bernhard were there with her swimming and painting.

During this period, probably August, Sickert wrote to a French painter that he had come to the French town for a rest. The French painter in a letter to his father mentioned that he had visited Sickert at that French town on September 16. On September 21 Sickert's wife in London wrote to her brother-in-law that Sickert was in France for some weeks with his people.

Cornwell believes that 'his people' in this letter referred to his friends instead of his relatives and that he had arranged with his friends to provide him with an alibi for this period. Shone cites other documents to show that Sickert was in France at the time when four of the six murders occurred in London.

Sickert had three childhood operations for a fistula, an abnormality found ordinarily in the rectum, bladder, or vagina. Cornwell writes that Sickert's fistula was in his penis, although she says, "I am not aware that anyone has ever said what this fistula was."

She states that she was told by the nephew of Sickert's third wife (whom he married in 1926) that Sickert had a hole in his penis. The same nephew also told her that Sickert said he did not want to have children. There is no available information on whether the operations corrected Sickert's fistula.

Even if it were a hole in the penis, we are not told, other than by Cornwell, what if any effect it might have had on his life. Cornwell assumes, however, that he therefore had physiological sex problems so that he "was probably incapable of an erection." And we read, "Sickert had sexual power only when he could dominate and cause death." She refers to the 'penis inadequacy' effect often.

Sickert married three times. He had no legitimate children, but Cornwell refers to a report that gives him one illegitimate son. His first wife divorced him for desertion and adultery, mentioning two unidentified women, even though she stated later that she was still in love with him. "He is never out of my mind day or night," she said, and she anonymously bought some of his paintings to help him financially.

Cornwell finds peculiarities in Sickert's life, sometimes coincidental with aspects of the Ripper case. However, what might seem to be peculiar in one person can look less conclusive when we consider that life in Victorian London was different from today's city life.

The book mentions that Sickert walked a lot, but so did most people. They had to in those days that lacked modern transportation facilities. Sickert wrote numerous letters, but that was the main form of communication for many people (perhaps similar to the numerous e-mails that people send today).

Official mail deliveries were frequent, several times daily, and there were unofficial messengers waiting on corners ready to deliver a letter for a fee, so that a person could send a query to a friend or business office in the morning, get an answer before noon, and have a response to that answer by early afternoon; telephones were in their infancy. Letters to the editor were sent with great frequency by literate Victorians, even of the upper class.

Of course, Sickert went to music halls, which were one of the main forms of entertainment in this pre-radio/television age, and he went to the areas where many of the music halls were, including East London.

Unquestioningly his paintings and sketches were morbid, but they were both praised by the experts and bought by the public, showing that he was not the only person in London and elsewhere with an interest in morbidity.

Prime Minister William Gladstone (1809-1898) walked disreputable streets at night himself for his stated purpose of engaging prostitutes in conversation to get them to change their ways.

Some of Sickert's stationery came from a given manufacturer and some of the Ripper letters were on the same brand of stationery, but this was a popular brand used by many people. It is difficult to build an incriminating case on coincidences.

One item from Cornwell's investigation stands out, but it is far from conclusive. There is no nuclear DNA evidence from Walter Sickert (who was cremated). There is, however, mitochondrial DNA on several letters of people associated with Sickert that matches mitochondrial DNA on one of the Jack the Ripper letters. Mitochondrial evidence is not as conclusive as nuclear DNA, and a match merely indicates that the person concerned is one of a given population.

David Cohen in an article published on the Internet by Microsoft's Slate, writes that he checked with New York's medical examiner's office and was told that statistically there were probably 33,000 people in London at the time to whom that particular mitochondrial DNA could belong. That is, anyone of 33,000 people could have written that particular Ripper letter, and even then there is no proof that the writer of that letter was in fact Jack the Ripper.

I found this book worthwhile to read, and I can appreciate Cornwell's desire to solve a famous historic case. We should not lose sight of the obvious truth that Cornwell is a good writer, as well as an experienced criminologist. However, I cannot conclude that Sickert either was or was not Jack the Ripper. I just don't know.

I don't think Cornwell has wasted her money on her investigation because it has produced a book that will be of interest to many people and will be 'must' reading for anyone fascinated by the Ripper story now and in the future, where it should be among standard reference works. But the book should be read more for any facts it presents than for conclusions.

Caution: I just read a long article by Wolf Vanderlinden titled "The Art of Murder" in which he gives much food for thought that Sickert had a certain fascination with the Ripper murders and could have used aspects of them in his paintings. Vanderlinden does not make any assertion that Sickert was the murderer, only that, like others, Sickert was influenced after the fact by the case. Vanderlinden in turn gives references to other books and articles, and these apparently could go on indefinitely.

Patricia Cornwell feels that the "Ripperologists" will be out in full force to oppose her, and she may be right. One would almost have to be a Ripperologist, either pro or con the Sickert theory, to want to read all the existing and no doubt forthcoming literature, and I for one will not have the time to do all that. But it does show how complicated this case has been and continues to be.

Readers of one review or one article or one book should be very reserved in making up their minds one way or another. Vanderlinden's article, as well as much other Jack the Ripper material, including dates and places for some of Patricia Cornwell's coming appearances (including Washington, DC on November 19, 2002), can be found at www.casebook.org

Reviewed by Eugene Aubrey Stratton, November 2002

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