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.”
&nb
sp; 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
10
11
About the Author
Patricia Cornwell, Chasing the Ripper
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