Patricia Cornwell - Chasing the Ripper

Other titles by Patricia Cornwell

S CARPETTA S ERIES

Postmortem

Body of Evidence

All That Remains

Cruel and Unusual

The Body Farm

From Potters 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

N ONFICTION

Portrait of a Killer: Jack the RipperCase Closed

A NDY B RAZIL S ERIES

Hornets Nest

Southern Cross

Isle of Dogs

W IN G ARANO S ERIES

At Risk

The Front

B IOGRAPHY

Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

O THER W ORKS

Food to Die For: Secrets from Kay Scarpettas Kitchen

Lifes Little Fable

Scarpettas 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 OLeary-Soudant

Contents

Preface

THE QUESTIONS Im 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?

Its fascinating to ponder the name Jack the Ripper. Who thought of it? Im quite certain he did. The Rippers 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 RipperCase Closed , it doesnt 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 werent 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 Rippers 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, its 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 Im giving are but a few of the details that create the intricate layers of this investigation. Its an extraordinarily complex one, rife with maddening subtleties. The more you look, the more you find. Theres no smoking gun. Im convinced there never will be. The police didnt know what to look for at the time, and Ive concluded its 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, theres no going back.

By the time Sickert reached his late twenties hed 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, whats 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. Its as if I had insulted the manhood of England. I didnt. I simply repeated what I had read and was told about Sickerts 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. Its rather stunning to realize Ive continued it ever since. Funny thing is, its not because Ive wanted tonot hardly when I consider the distractions, frustrations and aspersions, not to mention the time and expense.

But its been the right thing to do. My pursuit of the Ripper isnt a murder mystery or a thriller. It isnt an essay, a movie or a TV show. He isnt mere entertainment, and the defenseless women and children I believe he targeted were destroyed for real. They suffered and died terrifying deaths, and I dont believe for a minute that the Ripper killed only the prostitutes we hear aboutfive 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 didnt attribute any additional acts of depraved violence to the Ripper, then maybe Londons 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 didnt 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.