Thriller writer Patricia Cornwell says she has solved the Jack the Ripper case. But her theory that artist Walter Sickert was the killer has more than a few holes in it, says Aidan Dunne.
In a classic paper published in the journal Science in 1974, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky explored how human beings make judgments in the face of uncertainty, when only inadequate information is to hand. One of the recurring principles in the study was the idea of "availability". The most obviously cited effect of availability is the way someone such as, say, Robbie Williams, can top polls as the greatest musician of all time, despite evidence to the contrary. And availability surely contributes to the fact English painter Walter Sickert tops thriller writer Patricia Cornwell's list of Jack the Ripper suspects.
That isn't to say her theory is wrong, but the availability factor is crucial in relation to her assertions about Sickert's guilt.
Visiting Scotland Yard in London in May, 2001, Cornwell found herself with policeman Jack Grieve as a guide. He said if she considered looking into the Ripper killings, the artist Sickert made an interesting suspect. What might have been a story for Cornwell's heroine, forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta, became a real-life investigation, with the author taking on the mantle of her fictional protagonist.
Fast-forward to a book (and a fairly tacky Omnibus documentary), with the categorical title Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed. Cornwell signs off her acknowledgements with these words: "I honour those who have gone before me and dedicated their efforts to catching Jack the Ripper. He is caught. We have done it together."
Between August and November, 1888, a serial killer who became known as Jack the Ripper murdered and severely mutilated as many as seven prostitutes in Whitechapel. The killer was never identified or caught. Comparatively recently, Sickert's name began to be included in the list of potential suspects. A German-Danish painter who moved to England in 1868 and became a British citizen, Sickert admired and was associated with Whistler and Degas. Besides London, he spent time in Dieppe, Paris and Venice. By 1888, he was heavily involved in importing Impressionist ideas to England, but he was always interested in a more downbeat realism than the term Impressionist implies.
His liking for streetlife and dark psychological states became more evident in his work some years later, when he painted The Camden Town Murder and comparable subjects. While once dismissed, his later work, often drawing on second-hand media images, is increasingly highly regarded. Emotionally cold, arrogant and opinionated, Sickert was by all accounts not a likeable man, though he could be brilliant company. He died in 1947.
In the course of her investigation, Cronwell spent a great deal of money, bought 30 Sickert paintings and enlisted technical specialists in an attempt to find conclusive physical evidence that Sickert and the Ripper were the same man. Her case depends on three main lines of approach which, neither cumulatively nor individually, unequivocally identify Sickert as the Ripper, or come even close to doing so.
Her original idea was to use modern forensic techniques to investigate the Ripper's crimes. DNA analysis did not rule Sickert out as a suspect but, on the other hand, it certainly did not identify him as the Ripper. In fact, read carefully, Cornwell's text makes no dramatic claims for this avenue of research. Nevertheless, as one might expect, the DNA aspect has been given a much more positive spin in synopses and publicity material, and the notion that Cornwell has genetically identified Sickert as the Ripper will undoubtedly gain popular currency.
The other two main lines of argument suffer from a number of disadvantages, mainly caused by the lapse of time and numerous gaps in evidence and information - and by Cornwell's partiality.
One relates to the archive of letters purporting to be from the Ripper to the police. Cornwell's argument is that a significant part of this collection, generally presumed to be the work of numerous different hands, is substantially the work of Sickert. He was, she suggests, brilliant at manipulating his handwriting style.
Unless the physical evidence is unequivocal, handwriting analysis is not an exact science. It becomes even more complicated when virtually any letter can be assigned to Sickert on the basis of his presumed expertise.
Still, this is, arguably, the strongest aspect of Cornwell's case, which seems to promise a piece of actual physical evidence - a water mark - that could link him to one letter, albeit one that other researchers have long concluded was not written by the Ripper.
There is another significant issue about using analysis of the letters as evidence of the Ripper's identity. Notorious unsolved crimes invite all kinds of sick jokes, claims and correspondence from people who had nothing to do with the crimes, and writing bogus Ripper letters became something of a national pastime.
Faced with the resultant malleable mass of material, the principle of availability comes into play again. You can pick and choose whatever features favour your suspect, particularly if you presume the limitless dexterity with which Sickert is credited. An underlying drawback about this line of investigation is that, even if it had delivered the goods, it would have provided convincing evidence only that Sickert might have written one or two of the crank letters that poured in.
Late in the narrative, Cornwell reveals a new piece of evidence. Her acquisition of a guest book at a Cornish boarding house, contemporaneous with the Ripper's crimes, heavily annotated by a hand she believes is Sickert's as the Ripper, is an intriguing but extremely ambiguous object, and one that clearly needs further research.
The other main line of approach is to build a circumstantial case against Sickert. Cornwell goes to considerable efforts to establish whether he could have committed the murders and sent the letters. She has no doubt on this score, but the paucity of information and the distance in time militate against firm conclusions. So that we are, crucially, quite unsure that Sickert was even in London during the summer and autumn of 1888, despite her best efforts to put him there. The extant, indirect evidence seems to suggest that he wasn't. Again, more documentation is needed.
More tenuous still is her suggestion that painful childhood surgery on his penis, undertaken to correct a urinary problem, led to impotence and, eventually, homicidal rage, directed against women. She relies heavily on speculation, since evidence is scarce or non-existent. Again, while Sickert's three marriages produced no children, there was persistent gossip he had fathered illegitimate children.
It is unfortunate that she cannot resist writing Sickert into the role of the Ripper, so that whole chunks of the book read as a fictional narrative, not a speculative investigation of fact. Her entirely reasonable repugnance for the Ripper and his crimes is, not so reasonably, transferred intact on to Sickert.
The result is that everything about him is interpreted in the light of his presumed guilt.Even his practice of squaring up drawings for larger scale compositions, for example - standard practice for any artist of the time - is more than once cited as evidence of a peculiarly cold and calculating mind. And an aspect of his behaviour that might seem slightly more sinister, his penchant for maintaining several studios, is by no means unique among artists. His reported practice of using studio assistants is not mentioned, perhaps because it might contradict the image of the solitary, secretive killer.
London was horribly fascinated by the Ripper's grisly murders. They generated a huge amount of interest that was manifested throughout the print media and in popular culture.
This is a nasty, unpalatable fact but one that hasn't changed to any extent over time. Sickert's morbid curiosity is singled out as being culpable, but the same morbid curiosity is responsible for Cornwell's success as a writer of thrillers that promise grisly detail. It would surely be unfair to presume she might be a serial killer on the basis of her evident fascination with the details and psychology of such crimes, but for some reason she is unable to allow an artist in another medium the right to make a similar imaginative leap as herself.
Her interest is innately worthy, but Sickert's is evidence of pathological hatred and homicidal tendencies. One might expect such literalness from police detectives or even academic historians, but not from a writer whose stock in trade is to project herself imaginatively into other, darker characters.
While the presumption of guilt is legitimate for an investigator trying to think their way through the crimes from the point of view of the perpetrator, in Cornwell's hands it becomes an oddly circular, self-confirming process, as though Sickert's guilt is axiomatic. This attitude is a hallmark of many discredited police investigations.
Unfortunately what emerges is an attempt to make the facts fit the theory. One can feel for her when she says her research into the Ripper was unpleasant and depressing. Her meticulously detailed accounts of the murders are difficult and extremely disquieting to read. The murders committed by the Ripper or Rippers were horrible crimes, but to use the horror of the crimes as emotional ballast in her case against Sickert, as she does repeatedly, actually has no bearing on his innocence or guilt.
One element of her book is inevitably an oblique - and highly selective - biography of Sickert, and oddly, despite her presumption of, and continual insistence, on his guilt, there emerges the outline of another, non-Ripper Sickert, a man who seems primarily preoccupied by other things, the centre of whose life is elsewhere. Her Sickert is, of necessity, a fictional creation, but one that doesn't quite seem to gel with the real Sickert.
Without positively identifying someone else as the Ripper, it is not possible to prove Sickert was not the killer. That is a rather different proposition from insisting that he is, and hence attempting to destroy his reputation posthumously, on speculative grounds. Notwithstanding, the hard work Cornwell undoubtedly put into her research, you don't have to be a fan of Sickert's to feel distinctly uneasy at her attempt to push him into the frame.
Case closed? Not yet.
Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed, by Patricia Cornwell is published by Little, Brown (£17.99)