The crime novelist who tried to prove that Jack the Ripper was painter Walter Sickert
In the early 2000s, crime novelist Patricia Cornwell was busy spending upwards of £7million in a bid to prove that artist Walter Sickert was actually Jack the Ripper. Even now, If you look up his work on the Tate website, coming third in the “5 Things To Know About Walter Sickert” section, you’ll find thinly veiled irritation behind fun fact number three: “SICKERT WAS NOT JACK THE RIPPER”. When Cornwell waded into the Ripper debate, she was warned pretty universally she wouldn’t be popular and that the art world wouldn’t take to her theory.
Self-professed “Ripperologists” tried to dissuade her, as did the Met Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Grieve at the time. But Cornwell maintained her opinion that the painter had to be responsible for the murder spree and bought over 30 of his paintings to prove it. In the sense that there’s no smoke without fire, she was onto something – Sickert routinely painted scenes that mimicked the Ripper’s crimes and had an enduring fascination with painting prostitutes. That he was said to be in France at the time of the murders was clearly neither here nor there to Cornwell.
For reasons unknown, Cornwell became obsessed with the idea that Sickert was impotent. She clung to the idea that a defect in his penis, as well as the fact he walked away from three marriages childless, had turned him into a serial killer. After studying a series of paintings Sickert completed in 1908, which were inspired by the murder of a Camden prostitute, Cornwell was sure their similarities to autopsy photos weren’t a coincidence.
“This painter never painted anything he had not seen,” Cornwell assuredly told the Guardian. “This man was a very smart man. If you have these murders going on, then you started painting pictures of disembowelled women on the streets, somebody is going to say, ‘Let’s go take a look at this guy'”. Cornwell’s endless quest to prove Sickert’s guilt meant a lot of eyes were on her in 2001 when she took the investigative step of ripping up one of his canvases.
Sickert, who is considered by some one of Britain’s most prolific and important post-impressionists, had one piece of work forever ruined in the vain hope of finding some DNA that might link him to the murders. Cornwell then had a crack team assess the DNA on the back of envelopes involved with the Ripper case to compare them to Sickert’s own letters, which naturally she’d bought. Scientifically inclined Ripperologists pointed out that mitochondrial DNA testing on material over a century old had never been done.
The tests came back negative, and Sickler’s link to the Jack the Ripper case remains plausible, seemingly only to Cornwell. Coincidentally, she only began to think up these theories about a year before her book, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, was published.
Dive deeper into the theory with the video below.
