Patricia Cornwell is one of the more prolific crime fiction writers around, well-known by practically everyone even remotely into the genre. She's also tried her hand at several true crime books, her 2001 investigative account on Jack the Ripper claiming to have at last identified the real culprit responsible for the shockingly horrific murders of 5 (some say 6) prostitutes in London's east end during the summer and fall of 1888.
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.No serial killer can approach the infamy that the man known only by his pen name, Jack the Ripper, achieved in the late 1880's. One of the first to be classified as a "serial killer", Jack the Ripper was no doubt the nineteenth century's most notorious criminal, if not the most referenced murderer in all of history. Much of the attention surrounding the Ripper Murders is simply the fact that the real identity of the killer has remained unsolved, a condition only inflating the number of possible suspects, sparking numerous, ever-glamourized conspiracy theories and sustaining the ignominy of the real villain--whoever he may be. The case was not only ghastly in nature and method, it was peculiarly intriguing for a number of reasons: the social and political culture of the era, the murderer's indiscernible motives, loose theories involving celebrity suspects and the savagery of the crime contradicting modernist presumptions of civility. Mysterious clues left by the killer, and the he curious way in which the victims were "arranged"--each mangled corpse sprawled out on the ground usually with various internal organs missing--also contributed to the intrigue surrounding the case. Notes written to police at the time, letters claiming to be written by the killer and signed "Jack the Ripper", were used as evidence although no one was officially named as the prime suspect.
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Cornwell's theory pins a man named Walter Sickert as the official murderer. An artist/painter of marginal fame and a man who kept a residence in the area
of the murders during the period, Sickert was a gentleman who kept up with legitimate company and was known, even revered in certain circles. Yet he was also an individual who concealed a very secretive lifestyle. Since birth, Sickert suffered from a permanent sexual deformity, one which Cornwell postulates could have led to a violent, mysogynist disposition toward women and a need to act out his rage. Sickert's own artwork, Cornwell claims, even reflects Ripper-like undertones and particularly curious correlations to the Ripper murders, displaying denuded female figures positioned in strikingly similar patterns to that of the victims.
of the murders during the period, Sickert was a gentleman who kept up with legitimate company and was known, even revered in certain circles. Yet he was also an individual who concealed a very secretive lifestyle. Since birth, Sickert suffered from a permanent sexual deformity, one which Cornwell postulates could have led to a violent, mysogynist disposition toward women and a need to act out his rage. Sickert's own artwork, Cornwell claims, even reflects Ripper-like undertones and particularly curious correlations to the Ripper murders, displaying denuded female figures positioned in strikingly similar patterns to that of the victims. .
The book was actually a two year, multi-million dollar investigation (Cornwell traveled to England and actually purchased 19 of Sickert's original artworks to use as evidence) incorporating several highly sophisticated research techniques and DNA samplings. Yet despite all the effort, Cornwell was personally reviled by critics and fellow Ripperologists who stated that her investigation produced only limited circumstantial evidence; the context of which was solely conducive to her own theory and elicited facts which flew in the face of previously established patterns of evidence (e.g., Sickert was never, in over a century of scrupulously detailed analysis, among the 20 or so leading suspects and was even out of the country at indeterminate intervals during the murders).
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