Patricia Cornwell - Portrait Of A Killer - Jack The Ripper - Case Closed

Generations have been misled to think the Ripper letters are pranks, or the work of a journalist bent on creating a sensational story, or the drivel of lunatics, because that was what the press and the police thought. Investigators and most students of the Ripper crimes have focused on the handwriting more than the language. Handwriting is easy to disguise, especially if one is a brilliant artist, but the unique and repeated use of linguistic combinations in multiple texts is the fingerprint of a person's mind.

One of Walter Sickert's favorite insults was to call people "fools." The Ripper was very fond of this word. To Jack the Ripper, everybody was a fool except him. Psychopaths tend to think they are more cunning and more intelligent than everyone else. Psychopaths tend to believe they can outsmart those out to catch them. The psychopath loves to play games, to harass and taunt. What fun to set so much chaos in motion and sit back and watch. Walter Sickert wasn't the first psychopath to play games, to taunt, to mock, to think he was smarter than anyone else, and to get away with murder. But he may be the most original and creative killer ever to have come along.

Sickert was a learned man who may have had the I.Q. of a genius. He was a talented artist whose work is respected but not necessarily enjoyed. His art shows no whimsy, no tender touches, no dreams. He never pretended to paint "beauty," and as a draftsman he was better than most of his peers. Sickert "Mathematicus" was a technician. "All lines in nature… are located somewhere in radiants within the 360 degrees of four right angles," he wrote. "All straight lines… and all curves can be considered as tangents to such lines."

He would teach his students that "the basis of drawing is a highly cultivated sensibility to the exact direction of lines… within the 180 degrees of right angles." Allow him to simplify: "Art may be said to be… the individual co-efficient of error… in [the craftsman's] effort to attain the expression of form." Whistler and Degas did not define their an in such terms. I'm not sure they would have understood a word of what Sickert said.

Sickert's precise way of thinking and calculating was evident not only in his own description of his work, but also in the way he executed it. His method in painting was to "square up" his sketches, enlarging them geometrically to preserve the exact perspectives and proportions. In some of his pictures, the grid of his mathematical method is faintly visible behind the paint. In Jack the Ripper's games and violent crimes, the grid of who he was is faintly visible behind his machinations.

By the age of five, Sickert had undergone three horrific surgeries for a fistula.

In every Sickert biography I have read, there is no more than a brief mention of these surgeries, and I am not aware that anyone has ever gone on record to say what this fistula was or why three life-threatening operations were required to repair it. Furthermore, there is to date no scholarly, objective book that sets forth in detail his eighty-one years on this earth.

While much is to be learned from Denys Sutton's 1976 biography of Sickert because the author was a thorough researcher and relied on conversations with people who had known the "old master," Sutton was somewhat compromised since he had to obtain permission from the Sickert Trust in order to use copyrighted materials such as letters. The legal restrictions on the reproduction of Sickert materials, including his art, are the foreboding mountains one must scale to view the entire panorama of the man's intensely conflicted and complicated personality. In a research note in Sutton's archives at the University of Glasgow, there appears to be a reference to a "Ripper" painting Sickert may have done in the 1930s. If there is such a painting, I have found no mention of it anywhere else.

There are other references to Sickert's peculiar behavior that should have aroused at least a bit of curiosity in anyone who studied him carefully. In a letter from Paris, November 16, 1968, Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac, a well-known artist with connections to the Bloomsbury group, wrote Sutton that he had known Walter Sickert around 1930 and had very clear memories of Sickert claiming to have "lived" in Whitechapel in the same house where Jack the Ripper had lived, and that Sickert had told him "spiritedly about the discreet and edifying life of this monstrous assassin."

Art historian and Sickert scholar Dr. Anna Gruetzner Robins of the University of Reading says that she does not see how it is possible for one to study Sickert extensively and not begin to suspect that he was Jack the Ripper. Some of her published studies on his art have included observations that are a bit too insightful for the proper Sickert palate. It seems that truths about him are as cloaked in fog as the Ripper was, and bringing to light any detail that might portend anything ignoble about the man is blasphemous.

In early 2002, Howard Smith, the curator of the Manchester City Art Gallery, contacted me to ask if I was aware that in 1908 Walter Sickert painted a very dark, gloomy painting titled Jack the Ripper's Bedroom. The work was donated in 1980, and the curator at the time notified Dr. Wendy Baron - who did her doctoral dissertation on Sickert and has written more on the artist than anyone else - to let her know of this remarkable find. "We have just received a bequest of two oil paintings by Sickert," curator Julian Treuherz wrote to Dr. Baron on September 2, 1980. One of them, he said, was "Jack the Ripper's Bedroom, oil on canvas, 20x16"."

Dr. Baron replied to Mr. Treuherz on October 12th and verified that the bedroom in the painting was indeed the bedroom in a Camden Town residence (at 6 Mornington Crescent) where Sickert rented the top two floors when he moved back to London from France in 1906. Dr. Baron further observed that this Camden Town residence was where "Sickert believed Jack the Ripper had lodged" in the 1880s. Although I have not found any references to the Mornington Crescent address as the place where Sickert thought the Ripper once lived, Sickert could have had a secret room there during the 1888 serial murders. And in letters the Ripper wrote, he said he was moving into a lodging house, which could have been the one at 6 Mornington Crescent - where Sickert was living in 1907 when yet another prostitute's throat was slashed barely a mile from his rooming house.

Sickert used to tell friends the story that he once had stayed in a house whose landlady claimed that Jack the Ripper had lived there during the crimes and that she knew his identity: The Ripper was a sickly veterinary student who was eventually whisked off to an asylum. She told Sickert the sickly serial killer's name, which Sickert said he wrote down in a copy of Casanova's memoirs he happened to be reading at the time. But alas, despite Sickert's photographic memory, he could not recall the name, and his copy of the book was destroyed in World War II.

The painting Jack the Ripper's Bedroom was ignored and remained in storage for twenty-two years. It seems the painting is one of the few Dr. Baron has left out of her writings. Certainly I had never heard of it. Nor had Dr. Robins or the Tate Gallery or anyone else I met during my research. Apparently, not everyone is eager to publicize this painting. The idea of Sickert being Jack the Ripper is "rubbish," said Sickert's nephew John Lessore, who is not related to Sickert by blood but through Sickert's third wife, Therese Lessore.

While writing this book, I had no contact with the Sickert Trust. Neither the people who control it nor anyone else has dissuaded me from publishing what I believe to be the naked truth. I have drawn upon the recollections of people who were Walter Sickert's contemporaries - such as Whistler and Sickert's first two wives - who were under no legal obligation to a Sickert Trust.