Patricia Cornwell: Portrait Of A Killer

Reviewed by ROSS BURNS*

Patricia Cornwell is an icon of crime fiction. Her novels, particularly the Scarpetta series, have brought her fame, awards, and a substantial fortune. Some of that substantial fortune - reportedly about $6 million - has been spent on research for her latest project. In Portrait of a Killer she presents her evidence for the conclusion that Victorian artist Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper.

Jack the Ripper butchered several prostitutes in London's squalid East End in the late 1880s. He was never caught. He was the first popular serial killer, and his infamy has ensured that although more than a century has passed, he remains a subject of vigorous curiosity. Many books about the Ripper have been published, each of which has its own conclusion about his identity.

Walter Sickert was an Impressionist painter best known for his paintings of London theatre scenes, but his fascination with the macabre manifested itself in a series of paintings inspired by the killing of a prostitute in 1907 in the London suburb of Camden Town. He was a pupil of Whistler, a Royal Academician, and a callous, self-centred spendthrift.

Cornwell was briefly a crime reporter before working in a morgue for six years. Abused as a child, Cornwell has been described as difficult, paranoid and obsessive. She owns high-security homes and an arsenal of weapons as well as employing numerous assistants and bodyguards. Her literary marriage to the misogynistic Sickert is one made in hell.

Sickert is not a new figure in Ripperology. He was first linked with the killings, in a supporting role, by the theory published in the 1970s that the Ripper was the Queen's physician Sir William Gull. Thanks to Cornwell's research, Sickert has now reappeared as a soloist in his own right.

My brief is to review the evidence and decide whether it is sufficient to place Sickert on trial. I do not have to be, as Cornwell is, "one hundred per cent positive" that he is guilty, nor need I be concerned, as she is, that "If someone proves me wrong, not only will I look horrible about it. I will lose my reputation."

If the reputation of a Crown Prosecutor relied on always being right, it would not survive long. All I need is to be satisfied that a reasonable jury could convict Sickert on Cornwell's evidence.

Before he can take his place in the dock, Sickert will need to elbow aside a number of other accused, from Kosminski, the Polish Jew whose mind was deranged "from indulgence in solitary vices" to Gull and the Duke of Clarence.

The dedicated Ripper website at www.casebook.org ranks the 22 best-known suspects and places Sickert only fourth, well behind William Maybrick, a murder victim himself and the alleged author of the recently discovered, and probably fake, Ripper diaries.

Cornwell points to many aspects of Sickert's life that might tie him to the Ripper murders. He had a psychopathic personality. Genital mutilation during surgery to correct a birth abnormality might have made him sterile or impotent thereby generating the anger that drove the Ripper to his outrages. He loved the music hall, painted prostitutes and spent much of his time hanging about the East End. So, he had both motive and opportunity. But such circumstances are nothing more than background.

If a psychopathic disposition, a penchant for the low life and a small willy were enough to prove a man to be Jack the Ripper, there probably wouldn't have been a judge left on the English bench to sentence him. The conscientious prosecutor needs concrete evidence, and after 100 years that is more difficult to find.

Cornwell relies on two tangible items to support her case: Sickert's paintings and the Ripper letters. She says depictions of the subjects of some of Sickert's later paintings so closely resemble the morgue photographs of the Ripper's victims that Sickert must have been the killer.

As to the many hundreds of letters sent to the authorities at the time of the murders claiming to be written by the Ripper, she has discerned, where others have failed, that many of them seem to have stylistic similarities to Sickert's writing style. She has also observed that watermarks on several of the Ripper letters match those on known letters of Sickert's. This all sounds very well, but a small amount of research tends to suggest that most Ripper scholars and the police of the day considered almost all the letters as hoaxes. The watermarked paper came from prominent papermakers who produced it by the ton. Further, Sickert seems likely to have had access to the mortuary photographs, which were published in France soon after the killings. This does not mean he was present at the killings.

Cornwell has also turned to modern scientific techniques to supplement her intuition.

She horrified the art world by spending up to $2 million on Sickert's paintings and drawings and ransacking them for DNA, destroying at least one painting in a fruitless search. A DNA trace on a purported Ripper letter contained a faint but inconclusive resemblance to DNA on a Sickert letter. That particular Ripper letter seems, however, to be considered a hoax by most experts.

Science gives her no support and logic seems to have no place in her arguments. So, why is she so determined to throw away her money to damn Sickert? I deduce that it is because she doesn't like him very much. And that is understandable. Sickert was an odd and sometimes nasty man.

Crime writing often tells the reader as much about the author as it does about the subject, and that is clearly the case here. Cornwell makes no bones about her determination to identify the Ripper for the sake of his victims. Her book is unashamedly cast from their perspective.

In the filth and squalor that was the East End in the 1880s, thousands of women were forced into prostitution, their lives a tawdry round of furtive sex in dark foggy corners for a few pence which would be spent on drink or a room for the night in one of the vermin-infested lodging houses in the area. It was upon these "Unfortunates" that the Ripper preyed. Cornwell has said that the victims have a right to justice after 113 years. "They have a right for someone to care about them for once and not to care about him."

In a police report about a case, the use of the word "perhaps" on even one occasion makes a prosecutor pause. In Cornwell's book that word can appear many times in the course of a single paragraph. Biased investigation has caused many miscarriages of justice, and this is bias at a high level.

When juries are trying horrific cases, they are always warned that they should avoid making a scapegoat of the accused.

Sickert may well have been an urban reptile who was disdainful to his wife and contemptuous of his contemporaries. Those qualities do not mean that he should be placed on trial for murder, even when the world's foremost crime writer says he should.

After 100 years hard evidence is difficult to come by. Any case against the Ripper must necessarily be circumstantial. A circumstantial case is put together in the same way as a rope is woven; strand is wound upon strand until eventually the rope is sufficiently strong to support a verdict of guilty. Here, the rope woven is incapable of supporting the lightweight theories of Cornwell, let alone being strong enough to be a noose for Sickert.

"It is a capital mistake, my dear Watson, to theorise on the basis of insufficient data," said Sherlock Holmes.

The Ripper's frenzied, reckless attacks were the work of a seriously deranged personality, not of a man who was capable of living a relatively orderly life into the 1940s.

Cornwell goes beyond the recognised Ripper murders and suggests that Sickert was the author of several other unsolved crimes and that he continued to kill until old age overtook him. Investigators have been known to impute unsolved crimes to prolific offenders simply to clear them off the books. Cornwell does the same.

I have considered the evidence. I advise that it is insufficient to place Walter Sickert on trial for murder. No prosecutor could succeed. But as for Patricia Cornwell, I am tempted to recommend that she be prosecuted for attempting to pervert the course of justice. I think I might just win that one.

Little Brown $34.95

* Ross Burns is a crown prosecutor at Meredith Connell.