Jack the Ripper: Catch him if you can

Patricia Cornwell has worked as a police reporter for the North Carolina Charlotte Observer, as a computer analyst for the chief medical examiner in Richmond, Va., and as a volunteer police officer. But she is best known for the wonderful and wonderfully scary crime novels that feature a forensic master, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. In “Portrait of a Killer,” she shifts her criminal expertise from contemporary Virginia to late 19th century London. Cornwell is haunted by Jack the Ripper, who was never caught despite the hue and cry raised by his trail of fetid murders.

In 2001, Cornwell visited Scotland Yard and met John Grieve, an expert on the Ripper’s exploits, who pointed her toward a likely suspect: the painter Walter Sickert (1860-1942), “the most important of British Impressionists,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. As Cornwell set off to identify the Ripper, she became convinced that the two men were one. The abominable mutilations the Ripper inflicted reflect the murderous fantasies of a painter who doubled as a psychopath. “Portrait of a Killer” gives evidence of what, to the author, is an open-and-shut case. But is it as convincing as she claims?

The data gathered by Cornwell and her team are impressive. The bodies of the victims are long gone; Sickert’s corpse was cremated and few of his own papers are at hand; police work of the time largely ignored fingerprints and most of today’s forensic procedures. Nor was Sickert ever regarded as a suspect. Yet, determined research has thrown up a good deal of contemporary evidence; not least, scores of letters intended to taunt and exasperate the authorities. The Cornwell team also compared the rough daubs and stick figures of the “Jack the Ripper” letters with sketches by Sickert and found similarities. More important, they claim to have found traces of DNA on postage stamps and envelope flaps that they consider compelling. Some readers will not. While the search for scientific evidence continues, the strongest prosecution arguments are based on the subject’s psycho-biography: Childhood trauma, supposed penile deformities and sexual rage that Cornwell infers are said to have formed or deformed a vain, potentially violent man. If we are to judge Sickert on the evidence given here, the case is closed indeed. The great painter was a great nut too: charming at times, more often repellent.

Unfortunately, a bad character is not enough to convict beyond a reasonable doubt. Cornwell argues that Sickert’s works reflect “morbidity, violence and a hatred of women” and art experts with no ax to grind corroborate his “fascination with murder and sexual violence.” Cornwell demonstrates that Sickert could have carried out the Ripper’s crimes, that he habitually prowled the streets where they occurred, that he loved disguises and rented rooms as studios that could easily serve as bolt holes (or changing rooms). But Sickert was not the only misogynist of his day, or the only potentially violent man in the street. “There was a capricious and moody streak to his nature: He could flare up.” Sickert’s biographer Denys Sutton writes this not about his subject but about one of his friends, Sir William Eden, a gifted water-colorist. Talented gentlemen could at times act snarly.

Another contemporary figure emphasizes that point. Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet” was published only eight months before the first Ripper murder. It marked the appearance of Sherlock Holmes, also depicted as a master of disguise, moody, inconsiderate, who “never spoke of the gentler passions save with a gibe and a sneer.” Like Sickert, Doyle was the son of a man who painted and eventually declined into alcoholism. Conan Doyle’s own drawings are full of frightening figures and his Holmes stories pulse with unease and gore. Which is not to denounce an alternative suspect, but to indicate how easily suggestive evidence can be raked up. In the same vein, when Cornwell titles her first chapter “Mr. Nobody” because Sickert used “Mr. Nemo” (Nobody) as one of many pseudonyms, she gives no hint of the popularity of Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” whose misanthropic Captain Nemo was widely familiar in those days.

Cornwell moves too easily from hypothesis to certitude, from “may have” to “must have.” Before she’s halfway through, we’re told as a plain fact that Sickert was a murderer. Long before that, though, she convicts her quarry of psychological malfunctions deduced from the violent metaphors he used to discuss art: morbid horrors listed in an eloquent paragraph clinched by a quote from the English Review (Jan. 1912): “Enlarged photographs of the naked corpse should be in every art school as a standard of drawing from the nude.” If it matters, the sentence is out of context, referring to a 1652 etching by Karel du Jardin and its treatment by the artist.

Which should remind us, as Cornwell does not, of the painterly objectives of a man presented largely as a churl, a scourge to some, a scrounge to others. There’s no hint here that, in a society obsessed with the surface of things, Sickert attempted to delve beneath the shallows. Perhaps he aimed too low and came up less scintillating in the murk than his master, Whistler. Yet Sickert’s woozy washes tell more about the grubby, dismal world they sketch than the bleak social history Cornwell trots out.

Even so, it is unfair to cavil at an admirable obsession. The Ripper, Cornwell says, makes her angry: rightly so. Sickert does too. She detests her subject(s), conjugates the two men and, for good reasons, condemns both; but both as if they were one. And that, as Scottish courts say, remains not proven. Her book is dedicated to Scotland Yard’s Grieve: “You would have caught him,” it affirms. Quite possibly. But would it have been Sickert?