Super Cereal
I had great difficulty controlling my rage whilst viewing a Walter Sickert painting in New York’s American Museum of Natural History (or, possibly, The Metropolitan Museum of Art… I forget) during a family holiday some years ago. The reason for this anger was the stupid pair of girls standing next to me, and their conversation:
Stupid girl 1: ‘The guy who painted this was Jack the Ripper.’
Stupid girl 2: ‘No… really?’
Stupid girl 1: ‘Yeah, Patricia Cornwall found his DNA on some old letters and proved it’.
Stupid girl 2: ‘Wow, Patricia Cornwall is awesome’.
Stupid girl 1: (dreamily) ‘…Yeah’.
OK, so I’m paraphrasing, condensing and generally making up the conversation, but that was the gist of it. And it angered me for two reasons:
- Walter Sickert is my favourite artist.
- Patricia Cornwall is an idiot.
I have to admit that the first time I heard the name Walter Sickert was many years ago, and in connection with the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders of 1888. However, it was generally accepted, even at the time, that the likelihood of Sickert being the killer was about as credible as other ‘celebrity’ suspects, such as Prince Albert Victor, William Gull and Lewis Carroll.
This all changed when crime novelist Patricia Cornwall released her book ‘Portrait of a Killer - Jack the Ripper: Case Closed’ in 2002. In this, she claimed that she had solved the murder “100%”, and concluded that the killer was Walter Sickert.
These claims, based on the flimsiest of evidence, have been dismissed by the overwhelming majority of ‘Ripperologists’ as worthless. In fact, this article explains very thoroughly why Walter Sickert simply wasn’t the killer, matching Cornwall’s theories with ripostes such as ‘he almost certainly wasn’t even in the country at the time of the murders’. However, it frustrates me that people still seem to consider Sickert a killer - of course, the amount of media attention that greeted Cornwall’s findings was not matched when they were revealed as all but laughable, as a resounding disproval simply isn’t as news-worthy.
Anyway, from the above, you could conclude that I have more than a passing interest in the events of the Autumn of 1888. Jim can attest to my excitement after happening upon the Ten Bells pub in Whitechapel, which has long been associated with the murders, whereas I’m sure Ellie could tell you stories about me shouting at the television when Reeves and Mortimer concluded that the killer was Francis Tumblety in a recent programme.
My own opinion? Why, thank you for asking.
In 1894 the McNaghten Memorandum came to light, in which a senior police constable replied to press speculation by naming Michael Ostrog, Montague Druitt and Aaron Kosminski as suspects. Of these (and, bear in mind that this is a hugely truncated account) I believe the latter to be the most likely of all the named suspects. He lived in the right area, he had a ‘great hatred of women’ combined with ’strong homicidal tendencies’ and he also bore a ’strong resemblance’ to ‘the man seen by a City PC’ near one of the crime scenes. Kosminski was a sexual delinquent who was incarcerated in an asylum from 1891 until his death some twenty years later. Indeed, Kosminski would be a prime suspect… if there was any concrete evidence that he ever actually existed.
In fact, I am very tempted to discount all of the currently named suspects for one simple reason - the killings stopped after the dismemberment of the fifth canonical victim, Mary Jane Kelly. Criminal psychologists have almost universally agreed that your ‘average’ serial killer won’t stop until he is made to. This leads me to believe that the killer either (a) died (b) was incarcerated or (c) moved away. It seems very hard to believe that the perpetrator of these brutal crimes simply returned to a normal life and went about his daily business, living for (in some cases (such as Sickert’s)) twenty years or more after the events.
Of course, somebody commited these crimes, but, personally I very much doubt the guilt of any of the named suspects. Indeed, herein lies the overwhelming difficulty with attemping to reconcile the real-life face of ‘the Whitechapel Murderer’ with the media created ‘Jack the Ripper’ (the nickname was coined in a letter ‘from the killer’ which was almost certainly faked by a tabloid reporter in an attempt to glamourise the crime and sell more newspapers).
Whitechapel at the time was little more than a slum, the first port of call for every immigrant, sailor, pauper, tramp and vagrant. Keeping track of the population in 1888 would have been incredibly difficult (not that anyone especially tried); tracing the comings and goings after 120 years a veritable impossibility. Faced with this ever-changing mish-mash of people and cultures, combined with the lack of written evidence, I can forsee no way that anyone can ever categorically say ‘we have found the killer, and his name is…’.
There is, however, one more, final, lingering piece of evidence that intrigues me and has, I believe, been overlooked by ‘Ripperologists’ with a far greater interest and more time on their hands then I do. The one contemporary sighting of the killer that had the most credibility, both at the time and when scrutinised by modern-day investigators, has the perpetrator wearing a sailor’s cap. In fact, the eyewitness described it as the cap of a Norwegian seaman. A sailor on shore leave, perhaps, in London for a few months before sailing away, free to indulge whichever pleasures came most naturally… far from Whitechapel… and, most assuredley, far from Walter Sickert.