Review By D.W.

Crime writer Patricia Cornwell has conclusively cracked the century old case of England’s most infamous serial killer, Jack the Ripper. Cornwell is a bestselling author and she is also on the board of the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science as its chairperson. She approaches the case from a new perspective using modern forensic and psychological science. Her conclusions are sound and extremely plausible and her research is exhaustive.

Most Jack the Ripper theories revolve around interesting but far-fetched inconclusive conspiracies theories involving the Royal Family that are hard to substantiate. They also involve plausible suspects like Montague John Druitt because of some Ripper graffiti left near a crime scene implicating Jewish involvement. These theories are not nearly as comprehensive and holistic as Cornwell’s and rely little on accepted criminological methods.

Overall, Cornwell concludes that English actor and painter Walter Richard Sickert was Jack the Ripper.
 

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Sickert was born May 31, 1860 in Munich, Germany and died January 22, 1942 in Bath, England. Much is known about Sickert’s life and character as he was a celebrity and a prolific letter writer and managed to weasel his way into two marriages with wealthy families. He was also a student of the famous American painter James McNeill Whistler and later with French artist Edgar Degas.

Sickert wasn’t even considered a suspect in his lifetime even though he was in London not far from the murders at the time. He only became a suspect until after his death when a number of his lesser known paintings and private drawings surfaced. The most prominent of these was the Camden Town Murder, which he painted after a local prostitute was murdered while he was living not far from the scene. Many other paintings and drawings reveal similar Ripper related murder scenes and dead bodies that were eerily similar to the actual crimes. It has been established by independent art experts and biographers that Sickert only painted what he saw.

Cornwell’s research involved developing a psychological profile derived from his personal and family correspondences throughout his life. Sickert was profoundly narcissistic and displayed many traits of a sociopath, which is a fundamental characteristic of serial killers. Sickert, more than any other suspect, fits the behavioral profile of a serial killer. He wasn’t caught because criminal science was in its primitive stages at the time and the London police force was unequipped to deal with murderers like him.

Sickert was also quite clever and a very good actor which allowed him to fool most people who didn’t know the man behind the act.

Cornwell’s case is largely circumstantial but she does have some DNA evidence linking Sickert to Jack the Ripper. She has DNA-tested stamps and envelopes she believed to have been licked by Sickert and compared them with stamps and envelopes from letters written by Jack the Ripper. These items contained no nuclear DNA evidence, which is unsurprising considering their age and condition. She reports that in one case, the mitochondrial DNA that she assumes is from Sickert cannot be ruled out as being a match to the mitochondrial DNA found in one of the "Jack the Ripper" letters.

She conducted extensive analysis of all purported Jack the Ripper Letters, which contain the most damaging evidence against Sickert and reveal that he committed many more murders than the five attributed to him by the police at the time. Many more mutilated female bodies were uncovered in London and around England at the time and they were described in Ripper letters sent to the London police mocking them. One body was found in the foundations of the new Scotland Yard building being constructed at the time.

The London police didn’t attribute these murders to Ripper for various but unprofessional reasons and dismissed most of the letters for similar reasons. But viewed holistically, they all seem to add up when tied together with actual reported crimes. The letters also reveal that the writer was a wealthy educated person as they were written on expensive paper with expensive ink that Sickert was known to have used.

The letters also reveal very similar patterns aside from different handwriting styles. Cornwell believes that Sickert was a good artist and calligrapher so he could write in multiple styles. Word patterns and verbiage were remarkably similar in all the Ripper letters as well as the known Sickert letters. Sickert misspelled words and used vulgar language to throw off the police and it worked. However, the letters also contain complex words spelled correctly that only the educated used while the simple words were misspelled.

And Sickert didn’t just kill prostitutes; he also killed children, both boys and girls outside of London in the same manner as the Ripper killings and admitted to them or declared his intent to kill children in multiple letters. None of these murders were ever attributed to Jack the Ripper. He further claims to have killed people across the European continent but the French and Italians either kept poor or no crime records like the English did.

Multiple pieces of compelling evidence and an analysis of Sickert’s life point to him being Jack the Ripper. There is far more evidence condemning him than any of the other Ripper suspects. Using Occam’s Razor, which states that if all things are equal, two or more explanations existing for an unexplained phenomena, the simplest one is probably correct. Sickert is the simple and compelling answer for the Jack the Ripper mystery and is probably the right suspect.

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