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

The swabbed samples in the Jack the Ripper case can be imagined as fifty-five sheets of white paper that are cluttered with thousands of different combinations of numbers. Most of the sheets of paper have smears, and illegible numbers, and mixtures of numbers that indicate they came from many different people. However, two sheets of paper each have a sequence of numbers that came from a single donor - or only one person: One sheet is James McNeill Whistler, and the other is a partial postage stamp on the back of a letter the Ripper wrote to Dr. Thomas Openshaw, the curator of the London Hospital Museum.

The Whistler sequence has nothing in common with any Ripper letter or any other non-Whistler item tested. But the Openshaw sequence is found in five other samples. These five samples are not single-donor, as far as we can tell at this point, and show a mixture of other base positions or "locations" in the mitochondrial region. This could mean that the sample was contaminated by the DNA of other people. A drawback in our testing is that the ever-elusive Walter Sickert has yet to offer us his DNA profile. When he was cremated, our best evidence went up in flames. Unless we eventually find a premortem sample of his blood, skin, hair, teeth, or bones, we will never resurrect Walter Richard Sickert in a laboratory. But we may have found pieces of him.

The clean single-donor sequence recovered from the partial stamp on the back of the Openshaw envelope is our best basis of comparison. Its sequence is the three markers, 16294 - 73 - 263, or the locations of DNA base positions in the mitochondrial regions - rather much as A7, G10, D12, and so on indicate places on a map. The five samples that have this same 16294 - 73 - 263 single-donor Openshaw sequence are the front stamp from the Openshaw envelope; an Ellen Sickert envelope; an envelope from a Walter Sickert letter; a stamp from a Walter Sickert envelope; and a Ripper envelope with a stain that tests positive for blood, but which may be too degraded to determine if it is human.

The results from the Ellen Sickert letter could be explained if she moistened the envelope and stamp with the same sponge her husband, Walter, used - assuming either one of them used a sponge. Or Sickert might have touched or licked the adhesive on the flap or stamp, perhaps because he mailed the letter for her.

Other samples contained one or two markers found in the single-donor Openshaw sequence. For example, a set of white coveralls that Sickert wore while painting had a mixture of markers that included 73 and 263. What is startling about this result is that there was a result. The coveralls are about eighty years old and had been washed, ironed, and starched before they were donated to the Tate Archive. I saw no point in swabbing around the collar, the cuffs, the crotch, and the armpits, but we did it anyway.

The Openshaw letter that yielded the mitochondrial DNA results was written on A Pirie amp;; Sons stationery. The letter is postmarked October 29, 1888, mailed in London, and reads:

ENVELOPE: Dr. Openshaw

Pathological curator

London Hospital

White chapel

LETTER: Old boss you was rite it was

the left kidny i was goin to

hopperate agin close to your

ospitle just as i was goin

to dror mi nife along of

er bloomin throte them

cusses of coppers spoilt

the game but i guess i wil

be on the job soon and will

send you another bit of

innerds Jack the ripper

O have you seen the devle

with his mikerscope and scalpul

a lookin at a Kidney

with a slide cocked up

One reason I believe this letter is genuine is that it is so blatantly contrived. The bad handwriting looks disguised and is jarringly inconsistent with the handwriting of someone with access to pen and ink and fine-quality watermarked stationery. The address on the envelope is literate, the spelling perfect, which is vastly different from the overblown illiteracy of the letter with its inconsistent misspellings, such as "kidny" and -Kidney," "wil" and "will," "of" and "o." Steward P. Evans and Keith Skinner point out in their extremely helpful book jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell that the postscript in the Dr. Openshaw letter alludes to i verse in an 1871 Cornish folktale:

Here's to the devil,

With his wooden pick and shovel,

Digging tin by the bushel,

With his tail cock'd up!

An allusion to a Cornish folktale makes no sense if we are supposed to believe this Openshaw letter was written by an uneducated homicidal maniac who ripped a kidney from a victim and sent it off in the mail.

Walter Sickert visited Cornwall as a boy. He painted in Cornwall when he was Whistler's apprentice. Sickert knew Cornwall and the Cornish people. He was well read and was familiar with folk tunes and music-hall songs. It is unlikely that a poor, uneducated person from London spent time in Cornwall or sat around in the slums reading Cornish folktales.

One could argue - and should - that the absence of a reliable known reference source, in this instance Walter Sickert's DNA, suggests we are assuming without conclusive scientific evidence that the single-donor sequence from the Openshaw letter was deposited by Walter Sickert, alias Jack the Ripper. We can't assume any such thing.

Although statistically the single-donor sequence excludes 99% of the population, in Dr. Ferrara's words, "The matching sequences might be a coincidence. They might not be a coincidence." At best, we have a "cautious indicator" that the Sickert and Ripper mitochondrial DNA sequences may have come from the same person.

Walter Sickert was a forensic scientist's worst adversary. He was like a twister tearing through a lab.

He created investigative chaos with his baffling varieties of papers, pens, paints, postmarks, and disguised handwritings, and by his constant moving about without leaving a trail through diaries, calendars, or dates on most of his letters and work. His knockout punch to forensic science was to decide to be cremated. When a body is burned at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, that's the end of DNA. If Sickert left behind samples blood or hair that we could be certain were his, we have yet to find them.

Not even a pedigree of Sickert's DNA can be attempted because that would require a sample from his children or siblings. Sickert had no children. His sister had no children. As far as anyone can tell, none of his four brothers had children. To exhume Sickert's mother, father, or siblings on the remote chance that their mitochondrial DNA might have something in common with what Bode laboratories miraculously managed to conjure up from the genetic fragments of past lives we gave them would be ridiculous and unthinkable.

The Ripper case is not one to be conclusively solved by DNA or fingerprints, and in a way, this is good. Society has come to expect the wizardry of forensic science to solve all crimes, but without the human element of deductive skills, teamwork, very hard investigation, and smart prosecution, evidence means nothing. Had we gotten an irrefutable DNA match of a Sickert and a Ripper letter, any sharp defense attorney would say that Sickert's writing a letter doesn't prove he murdered anyone. Perhaps he simply composed a number of Ripper letters because he had a wacky, warped sense of humor. A good prosecutor would counter that if Sickert wrote even one of those Ripper letters, he was in trouble, because the letters are confessional. In them, the Ripper claims to have murdered and mutilated people he calls by name, and he threatens to kill government officials and police.

The watermarks add yet another layer. To date, three Ripper letters and eight Sickert letters have the A Pirie amp; Sons watermark. It seems that from 1885 to 1887, the Sickerts' 54 Broadhurst Gardens stationery was A Pirie, and was folded at the middle like a greeting card. The front of the fold was bordered in pale blue, the embossed address also pale blue. The A Pirie amp; Sons watermark is centered on the crease. In the three Ripper letters, the stationery was torn along the crease and only half of the A Pirie amp; Sons watermark remains.