RIP IN PEACE?
FOR OVER A CENTURY, JACK THE RIPPER GOT AWAY WITH MURDER. NOW BEST-SELLING CRIME WRITER PATRICIA CORNWELL IS CONVINCED SHE KNOWS HIS IDENTITY
by Jason Zasky

In the annals of crime, Jack the Ripper's identity has been one of the most enduring unsolved mysteries. In the summer of 1888, an unknown killer began terrorizing London's East End, committing a string of increasingly gruesome murders that baffled and frustrated police. The perpetrator was bold and exceedingly violent—slashing, stabbing, disfiguring and disemboweling his victims—writing taunting letters to the police and media all the while. Eventually, the killing spree came to an end, but speculation about whodunit has been a source of controversy ever since.

In the spring of 2001, Patricia Cornwell—author of number-one best-sellers like "Isle of Dogs" (2001) and "Last Precinct" (2000)—decided to investigate the Ripper crimes using modern forensic technology and techniques, not to mention 21st century understanding of serial killer behavior. After an exhaustive investigation that cost millions of dollars and involved a slew of forensic experts, Cornwell found substantial evidence that Jack the Ripper was Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942), one of Great Britain's most famous painters. In her most recent book, "Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper -- Case Closed" (Putnam), Cornwell discusses the evidence that led her to this seemingly surprising conclusion. In the following conversation she recounts how, when and why she decided to pursue Jack the Ripper.

How did you get involved in researching the Jack the Ripper murders?
I got involved completely by accident. In May of 2001, while on a trip to London, I was invited to tour Scotland Yard. There I met with Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Grieve, who is probably the most respected investigator in Great Britain, and as it turned out, an expert in Jack the Ripper's crimes. Jack the Ripper interested me mildly, but I knew nothing about his homicides. I'd never read a Ripper book, and I didn't know how his victims died or that they were prostitutes. Out of curiosity, I asked Grieve to tell me a bit about the murders. Needless to say, he came at them from an investigative point of view. Then, on a cold, raw, rainy morning he took me to Whitechapel and showed me what was left of the crime scenes for five Ripper victims. As we talked about the various suspects, what truly sparked my interest was when I asked if anyone had ever revisited the Ripper investigation using modern forensic science.

Were you surprised when Grieve told you no one had revisited the case?
It did surprise me a bit, but then I realized that's not the kind of thing Scotland Yard is going to do. Even though there's no statute of limitations on homicides, we know the perpetrator of the Ripper crimes would have to be dead. Law enforcement doesn't have the time to investigate cases of antiquity when they've got living murderers to track down. And non-law enforcement investigators face a whole other set of obstacles. Scientific testing and analysis is incredibly expensive and requires access to original evidence and documents.

You have compiled a wide range of circumstantial and physical evidence that indicates Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. Is the case closed, as the subtitle of "Portrait of a Killer" suggests?
Yes, the Ripper murders are solved. But that doesn't mean all the questions have been answered. For example, I don't think we'll ever know how many people he killed. There were other unsolved murders in London and in various parts of the country Sickert visited in which the modus operandi points strongly to him. I suspect there were also numerous murders in Italy and France, where Sickert spent a lot of time.

Of course, Sickert's case is an unusual one. Because he was never a suspect and was never caught, he was allowed to kill with impunity as long as he had the drive. Violent psychopaths typically begin killing in their mid- to late-20's, and unless they are caught, continue all the way until their late 50's. Then their sexual physical energy diminishes and they burn out. They continue to be psychopaths, but they don't go around committing serial murders. Sickert—who at the very least started his killing spree when he was 28—would have burnt out by his 50's. That's when he began his infamous Camden Town Murder series as well as a series of paintings featuring seemingly dead women sprawled on beds. It was also around this time that he painted Jack the Ripper's Bedroom, which depicts the bedroom he was living in at the time he painted it. A lot of his paintings from that era are very disturbing to look at.

What was your next step after learning that no one had ever applied modern forensic science to the Ripper evidence?
I put together a team of forensic specialists from the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, and brought them over to London so they could begin their analysis. I also took them to other places where they could examine Sickert-related materials, such as the archive of John McNeill Whistler in Glasgow. Sickert had been a student/apprentice to Whistler. As the case evolved, I brought in other experts and showed them what we had found. I brought in paper experts, paint experts, art experts, DNA experts, fingerprint experts, image-enhancement experts—basically experts in every type of forensic science applicable to the case—all at my expense. It was amazing to watch as they analyzed the evidence and, one by one, either changed their minds or made discoveries that buttressed the notion that Sickert was the Ripper. There's no way these people would be anything but objective because they were putting their reputations on the line.

What sort of archival research did you do?
I researched everything I could find about Sickert and Jack the Ripper, including every government record and police record still in existence. We're talking thousands of pages—every inquest report, morgue photograph and every shred of an autopsy report. Unfortunately, many of those are no longer in existence. I microfilmed the entire Sickert archive, which also amounted to thousands of pages. Sickert was an incredible egotist with a real gift for putting himself center stage. He was also a newspaper hound and a prolific writer. Over the course of a 20-year period, he wrote hundreds of letters to newspaper editors and saved every clipping that even remotely mentioned his name. I also thoroughly researched the family archive of Sickert's first wife, as well as the family archives of other Ripper suspects.

What was the greatest challenge you faced in looking into a series of crimes that occurred over a hundred years ago?
The greatest challenge was in tracking Sickert's movements. He was far too cunning to leave a trail. Few of his letters were dated, and he kept no date books or journals. That made it incredibly difficult to pin down where he was at any given moment. What we had to do was find bits and pieces wherever we could—in newspaper articles, listings of gallery exhibits, letters to friends containing references to London events he had attended—to create even the slightest mosaic of his whereabouts. In some cases, we got lucky. For example, the postmarked envelopes to some of his letters still exist. That helped us pinpoint him in specific areas on specific days. And he did date some of his earliest drawings. That helped me place him in London just days before what I consider to be the first Ripper murder. Another challenge was the fact that he was fluent in French. Halfway through a letter he would switch from English to French, or he'd write an entire letter in French. As if that wasn't bad enough, his handwriting was dreadful and often difficult to decipher.

"I write about violence for a living, but I don't use violent language in my everyday letters."

Finding information on a trail so cold it almost didn't exist—left by someone who was extremely clever and didn't want to leave a trail—was a huge problem. Yet, Sickert was someone who loved to leave little clues regarding his identity as the Ripper. For example, I was recently at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles going through their small collection of Sickert letters. In one of them, from 1914, he writes to a friend: "You'll never know how hunted I've been in the years that you've known me." What does that mean? How many people talk about being hunted? I've studied Sickert's language very carefully. His correspondence and art reviews are filled with words, phrases and metaphors like "eviscerate," "castrate," "slash," "dead ladies' hearts," "hacking himself to pieces," "blood," and so on. I write about violence for a living, but I don't use violent language in my everyday letters. There's no doubt he was hunted. The only problem was that the hunters didn't know they were looking for him.

We all know that forensic technology has changed since the Victorian era. How has our understanding of the psychology of serial killers developed since then?
For one thing, we no longer believe in physiognomy [in which physical features are used to infer the relatively enduring character of the individual]. During the Victorian era this was one of the primary means of classifying criminals and suspects and linking them to crimes. Essentially it held that people look like what they are. According to this so-called science, thieves were usually frail, rapists were usually blond, pedophiles were delicate and looked childish, and female offenders were usually ugly. So Jack the Ripper would have to have looked like some Neanderthal with a receding hairline, small brain and beady eyes. That's the kind of thinking that prevailed when the Ripper was making his rounds. Today, we know that killers can be very smart and attractive, the kind of person who sits right next to you in your workplace.

In the Victorian era they also didn't understand psychopathology the way we're beginning to understand it now. One of the misconceptions that got police off on the wrong trail was the notion that serial killers kill each of their victims in the exact same way. If various murders weren't identical to those attributed to the Ripper, they were dismissed as copycat killings or unrelated. We now know that specific circumstances play a great role in how each of a serial killer's murders is carried out.

Also, many years ago, the police didn't understand that serial killers escalate in their violence. In many instances it is this escalation that accounts for changes in a killer's modus operandi. The police also should have paid more attention to the fact that Jack the Ripper never raped his victims. There was no evidence of what they called "connection"—no recent seminal fluid. Today, that would have been an important part of the killer's psychological profile. The Ripper murders were clearly sexual crimes, but there was no sexual contact between the killer and his victims. We know Sickert was born with a deformity of his penis requiring surgeries that would have left him disfigured if not mutilated. In all likelihood, he was incapable of an erection.

What led Sickert to commit his crimes?
I think he had an intense hatred of women, which was perhaps fueled by the terrible disfigurement he suffered as a child. I think he was also driven by the abuse and violence he experienced when he was little. His father was a cruel man, and the surgeries he was forced to undergo would certainly have seemed violent to a young boy. On top of that, he was a violent psychopath. These are people who have no feelings or sympathy for others and no remorse for anything they do. In the case of sadistic psychopaths, they derive pleasure from the pain they cause. You add that all together in one person and you've got a bomb walking around on two legs.

What do you consider the most intriguing evidence that indicates Sickert was Jack the Ripper?
One of the most intriguing bits of evidence came from DNA tests. We found a single donor sequence of mitochondrial DNA on the stamp of a letter Jack the Ripper wrote to Dr. Thomas Openshaw, curator of the London Hospital museum. Single donor means it came from only one person. We found that same sequence on a Ripper envelope with a stain that tested positive for blood. We also found it on an envelope flap from a Sickert letter and on a stamp from another Sickert envelope.

We were also intrigued to find artistic mediums on the Ripper letters—watercolor paints, brushstrokes and writing done with drawing pens and colored grease pencils. Most interestingly, we found brown smudges that a lot of people thought was blood, but which turned out to be etching ground. Etching ground is a mixture of wax, oil and resin that artists use to cover copper plates when they are doing etchings. At the time of the Ripper murders, etching was one of the mediums in which Sickert was working. Etching ground is not the kind of thing you buy off the shelf. You mix it up yourself according to your own particular recipe. Most artists who did etchings mixed up their own ground using recipes they learned from their masters or mentors. Although they're not identical, we did find similarities between the etching ground on the Ripper letters and the etching ground used by Sickert's teacher, James McNeill Whistler.

Finally, we found three different types of watermarks on Ripper letters that match watermarks on the stationery Sickert was using at the time of the Ripper murders. By themselves, these individual bits of evidence are not conclusive. But if you put them all together along with everything else, you suddenly start getting a very clear picture. I would say Mr. Sickert would have had a lot of explaining to do.

What surprised you most as you conducted your investigation?
I was shocked at the evidence we found on the Ripper letters. Nobody had ever bothered to look at the watermarks before. No one had ever noticed the use of artistic materials and techniques. The police dismissed most of the letters as hoaxes written by illiterates or lunatics. The fact that they failed to recognize the oddity of watercolor paints or an artist's fine brushstrokes is hard to fathom.

"When I realized I was on the path of the real Ripper, I felt I had a moral responsibility to go all the way. I felt I owed it to the victims and to humanity."

I was also surprised at how many letters there were. Between the Public Record Office and the City of London archives, there are probably about 250 Ripper letters still in existence today, and I believe Sickert wrote most of them. The extent to which the evidence on those letters corresponds to his personal and professional life is amazing. The biggest mistake Sickert made—and the one that in the end nailed him—was writing taunting letters to the police and the press. He was so cocky and proud of what he was doing that he just couldn't resist. He left a trail that—at least in this day and age—can be interpreted in a meaningful way.

What do you think readers will find most surprising in "Portrait of a Killer"?
I think readers will be surprised when they see what a remarkable human being Sickert was. He was totally different from what people envisioned the Ripper to be. We're talking about a blond, blue-eyed, handsome man who was known for his good looks. He was charming, witty, multi-talented, scientifically and mathematically inclined, and fluent in at least five languages. He spent his time with people who were considered the celebrities of the Victorian era, including Oscar Wilde, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas, Marcel Proust and many others. That is not what anybody was looking for in the hunt for Jack the Ripper.

Some critics have said that your evidence is circumstantial at best. How do you respond?
There's certainly enough evidence for a prosecutor to take to court and let a jury decide. When you have coincidence after coincidence after coincidence, it's no longer a coincidence. I stand by my evidence, and let them prove me wrong. They won't be able to because it's all true.

What was Grieve's reaction to what you found?
He said that had he been there during the initial Ripper investigation, knowing what we uncovered, he would have immediately ordered surveillance on Sickert and obtained search warrants. That's a pretty big statement for a Scotland Yard investigator to make.

In the end, what do you want readers to get out of the book?
I want readers to be convinced that Sickert was Jack the Ripper. I also want them to see the Ripper murders for what they were. These were not cute little mysteries to be transformed into parlor games, movies, or the subject of conventions for mystery buffs, but rather a series of terrible crimes that no one should get away with, even after death. Most of all, I want readers to understand how modern science and medicine can be used to solve a case even this old. I hope people will gain a deeper respect for the men and women who conduct modern investigations and the technology they use. When it's all said and done, the point of all this is to take what we know and apply it to the living.

In chapter two you recall your experience working on the book and how it was ruining your life—that you were uneasy about what you were doing. What made this project so difficult for you?
I hope I never have to live through something like this again. I stumbled into this investigation while doing research for my next novel. However, when I realized I was on the path of the real Ripper, I felt I had a moral responsibility to go all the way. I felt I owed it to the victims and to humanity. I knew it would be all consuming and incredibly expensive, but I was driven to see it through to the end, no matter the conclusion. Also, after 11 years of writing about crime—which resulted in great personal success and privilege—I wanted to give back to society. As my research drew me into the bowels of the case, there were a number of things that occurred to me. I thought about how people might respond to my investigation and that it might not all be positive and supportive. As a matter of fact, I realized that I would probably come up against some intense antagonism, especially from people who had their own theories.

The process was not easy by any means. Personally, the investigation meant a huge commitment of time and money—18 months of research, 20 trips to England and over six million dollars of my own money. I also had to delay my next novel, which in the beginning didn't make me happy. Plus, I was concerned that I might disappoint my fans. The hardest part, though, was my fear of waking up one morning and discovering that I had been on the wrong trail or that I would have to recant after all the effort and expense.

Also, the reason I was being extremely meticulous and methodical about my work on this project was because I didn't want to mistakenly blame someone for a crime he or she didn't commit. That is one thing that really frosts me about the Ripper theories. I don't think you should ever theorize about somebody being a criminal just because they are dead and you can get away with it. I hope I have exonerated the names of a few people who have carried the stigma of accusation for over a century.