Cornwell's case against Walter Sickert as Jack the Ripper (Yet Again, I know)

Great Debates
1

Links to some old threads on the subject are at bottom of post.

Ms. Patricia Cornwell may or may not be a hack but she doesn’t, IMHO, have a flair for presenting her own best case, so the prosecution is dismissing her and the case will be presented by others from the prosecutorial team. If you’re familiar with the evidence and the issues, I ask you to suspend what you think you know about the Cornwell case re: Walter Sickert being Jack the Ripper, and let’s start afresh.

Let’s get started, shall we? OK, Two “Jack the Ripper” letters, written on Gurney Ivory Laid paper, were from the same batch, or ream, as three Walter Sickert letters also written on Gurney Ivory Laid. Not merely “the same stationery”. Not merely “the same watermark”. The same physical batch of paper, coming from the same original quire of 24 press sheets. [Cornwell, Chapter 15].

Perhaps, as Cornwell notes, “he simply composed a number of Ripper letters because he had a wacky, warped sense of humor”. Or perhaps Jack the Ripper broke into Sickert’s studio and swiped some of his stationery. Or perhaps Sickert’s wife, who had access to the stationery, was actually Jack the Ripper. There were something like 600 such letters and it is widely believed that most of them are frauds, copycat letters, etc, anyway. But this would be sufficient to bring Walter Sickert in for questioning, at least, yes?

The suspicious painting
Morgue photos and detailed descriptions of the condition of the victims was not public knowledge. I want to focus on one thing not specifically emphasized by Cornwell in her book but startling to me when I saw a good-quality reproduction of Sickert’s painting Putana a Casa: that lady’s lips are cut in half! I have looked all over for a decent online copy of Putana to no avail; anyone able to locate one, please post a link. The scans I’m using are pretty lousy, so to an extent I am reduced to humbly asking you to partially take my word for it, that the lips of the woman in Putana a Casa look to be cloven vertically into left and right pieces. It’s far more obvious and compelling than in the low-quality scans I’m postng here. The reason this is relevant is that the Ripper victim Catherine Eddows had her lips sliced in exactly that fashion: “The cuts to her face were quick and forceful, the slices to her lips completely dividing them and cutting into the underlying gums” [Cornwell, p 230].

People’s Exhibits 1, 2, 3

Eddows
Putana a Casa
Putana details

By itself, this means essentially nothing. I find it too far-fetched to say “coincidental artistic license” because vertically cloven lips are such an unlikely artistic affectaton, but somehow knowing and painting what the victim looked like after the attack doesn’t make Sickert a murderer.

But evidence adds to evidence here. I think this alters reasonable conjectures we might have made about Walter Sickert strictly in light of the stationery: from “Walter Sickert wrote some so-called ‘Jack the Ripper’ letters, perhaps on a whimsical lark” we must now move to “Walter Sickert was rather obsessed with Jack the Ripper and wrote some of these letters as part of a larger pattern of being wrapped up in the Whitecastle murders, and at some point got a forbidden glimpse at the morgue shots and/or the murder victim and then created paintings inspired by them”.

(We do know for certain Walter Sickert created some Ripper-inspired paintings, insofar as he titled one such painting “Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom”, using his own bedroom as the model, make of that no more than you necessarily must).

Still doesn’t mean he committed the murders, of course. The defense may yet claim that is still plausible to say that Sickert wrote some Jack the Ripper letters and viewed the murder sites and morgue pix and created Ripper-themed paintings because the darkness of the subject matter appealed to his artistic sensibilities.

The prosecution rests. (None of the other Cornwell ‘evidence’ is worth introducing, and doing so will just muddy up the presentation and make it easier to dismiss the whole works)

Among the most cogent defenses (assuming Sickert’s team needs anything aside from “We don’t think the prosecution has made a case here”) is the claim that he has an alibi placing him elsewhere at the time one of the Ripper murders was committed. I’ve seen that claim made on web sites disparaging Cornwell’s claims, but no specifics were given. If anyone should have access to direct alibi evidence, that should table the discussion pretty effectively, whereas “So and so says he was in France from XX to YY” would be pretty indirect and weak, and inconclusive.

Switching roles now, and giving my own opinions:

• I would certainly not vote to convict on murder charges, based on the criminal standard of a reasonable doubt.

• If the victims’ families were bringing a civil suit for damages, it would be a closer call, based on the standard of preponderance of the evidence. Is it really “more likely than not” that Sickert was the Ripper? For me, tough call, leaning towards “yes”, actually.

• If asked to finger someone as the most likely candidate, absolutely. It’s entirely plausible.
MY CONCLUSION: Patrcia Cornwell has a better case than her book makes it look like she has. She wasted way too much of folks’ attention-span with blather and unsupported surmise, annoyed people with her tone of fait accompli and quot ergo demonstratum, and made a huge mistake going on and on about those mitochondrial DNA findings.

Old Threads:

Has Patricia Cornwell solved the Jack the Ripper case? Diogenes the Cynic 2002

Jack the Ripper, Patricia Cornwell — Isn’t this done? WordMan 2002

Jack the RIPPER? PHA_for_life 2003

2

My impression of the Cornwell book is that she made a fair case (not conclusive) that Sickert was a creepy guy who wrote some Ripper letters. Was there any physical evidence at all tying him to any of the murders (I don’t remember seeing any)?

Maybe my video resolution is sub-par, but in the SIckert Putana painting links, all I can see is a sharp line of shadow, not cleaved lips.
Did Toulous Lautrec have a good alibi? :smiley:

3

It’s the best quality scan I could find, and it admittedly sucks. If I could find a decent depiction, believe me, the lips thing is disconcerting and creepy as all get-out.

No physical evidence tying Sickert to the actual murders.

4

This one is a little old, but since it went uncorrected for ignorance (not the poster’s, Cornwell’s) and I’d rather not leave it that way…

The concept that those letters all came from the same quire is absolute nonsense. If you look at the watermarks on the main Sickert letter and the main Ripper letter being discussed (and as shown in her book), the stationery came from entirely different years. The idea that they could have belonged to the same original set of 24 sheets is just implausible beyond belief. Just because a multi-millionaire can pay an expert to make some fancy claim, it doesn’t mean that it’s really real. How many “expert” opinions on things like this have been proven wrong before just by mistakes or a rush to make some announcement to get publicity for oneself, and then think how much more likely it is to happen when you get a huge paycheck out of the deal. Everyone involved in the team knew exactly what Cornwell wanted before they started out, so it should come as no mystery that they “found” things.

And, second, you have two major flaws with the idea that he had to be the Ripper based upon alleged similiarities between morgue photos of some Ripper victims and some paintings. First, these similarities are alleged, and you are probably only seeing them as a form of suggestion, meaning you were told what you were going to see and you interpreted it that way. The style of paintings is pretty standard to lots of other authors with visible brush strokes, to think that they represent wounds is quite a stretch. Second, the claim that these photos were not seen in public is false. At least two books published in France displayed the photos in question before these paintings were ever made. Guess where Sickert lived a great deal of the time (including, let’s not forget, during the actual Ripper murders themselves)? That’s right, France. If you assume the paintings were based upon these photos (which I don’t see at all as logical, but whatever), he easily could have seen them just like any other book-buying member of the public.

Cornwell’s book is just ridiculous all around, and it’s difficult to find any page that doesn’t have some major factual error.

5

What do you think of the James Maybrick case? Here’s a decent set of links on general Ripperology, pointed specifically towards the Maybrick Diary.
http://www.casebook.org/suspects/james_maybrick/may.html
Hm. Looks like it was a forgery after all.
http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/maybrick_diary/factfile.html
Too bad.

6

Dan Norder:

If that’s true, Cornwell has nothing. The spine of any case she’s got is her claim that the individual pieces of stationery came from the same quire.

7

If you go to the photo section of her book dealing with the letters (in my hardback it’s between p. 116 and 177 kind of in the middle) you can see closeups of the two most important letters she compares and see the last two digits of the year in the watermark.

You also asked above about the alibi. Two separate people writing letters to other note that Sickert was in France in September of 1888 as part of an about a month-long working vacation. He further worked on a painting there (of a French beach I believe, some location that’s known) and finished it in early October 1888. Three of the most important of the Whitechapel murders (two of whom are the only victims who are never disputed as possible Ripper victims by pretty much anyone, certainly not Cornwell, as she claims Sickert’s later paintings were based upon one of them) happened in September of 1888.

8

Sorry about the delayed response.

In my paperback copy the images I believe you’re referring to appear between pages 114 and 115. These are images of two letters written on A. Pirie and Sons stationery. One shows a year ending in “86” and the other shows a year ending in “87”.

These are not the letters Cornwell refers to as being from the same quire of 24 sheets.

On pp 172-173 (paperback edition) Patricia Cornwell writes:

As I said in my OP, Cornwell does a bad job of laying out her evidence, emphasizing unimportant findings and interspersing the more important ones without emphasis. This tendency is manfested here by putting in a photo of a Sickert / Ripper letter-pair on A Pirie and Sons from different quires / years (yawn) instead of a photo of the Gurney Ivory Laid letters that she and Bower assert are from the same quire of 24 sheets (no yawn).

As for the alibi: unless these are people who were in France to see Sickert within the explicit timeframe of the murders, as opposed to people who merely say that Sickert was in France for approximately a month, that doesn’t conclusively prove much. Especially if they are not reporting that they were in France and Sickert was there, as opposed to noting that “Sickert is in France this month” while posting from England etc. Do you have more info / URL to sources?

9

I believe those two are among the claim of 24 sheets, but, regardless, my arguments above about how an “expert” hired by a millionaire who was looking for a certain result simply cannot be considered valid until they are confirmed by mutliple outside sources still hold. Science isn’t science without verification.

And I’m afraid that the balance of evidence clearly shows Sickert was in France and there is no evidence to the contrary (other than her claims that he mailed letters in England at that time, which is circular reasoning, because she believes that because she believes he was the Ripper and believes the Ripper mailed off hundreds of letters).

These are both simple matters. The basics of empirical knowledge and fair debate show that she has to prove her side, not that her side is right unless people can prove her wrong.

She has no case, other than the word of people she paid money to to say what they said and her character assasination on a man who wasn’t even in the country at the time.

10

Well, one of them was exactly that situation… family member saying she was there with him at the time. One of them is a freaking painting he did that month with an identifiable landscape. Another one was someone else saying that Sickert was off in France.

As compared to nada giving any evidence he was in England, when he was the kind of famous person whose presence there would have been noted. In fact there are multiple constant reports of him being there up until his vacation and then multiple constant reports after he returned.

Try a Google for “Sickert was in France” or “Sickert alibi” or even “Sickert not Jack the Ripper” – you can probably even get away with the I’m feeling lucky button on that one, as this info is all over the place.

11

The Spectator had a pretty good list of the numerous points of evidence showing that Sickert was in France during the murders:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/newdesign/books.php?id=1268&page=1
http://www.spectator.co.uk/newdesign/books.php?id=1268&page=2
http://www.spectator.co.uk/newdesign/books.php?id=1268&page=3

Page two was the main one, but the other pages point out additional flaws in her argument as well. If those don’t work (they weren’t working as I tried them just now) you can put those addresses into Google individually as the search term and then choose to bring up the cache of the page.

There was more evidence than I remembered off the top of my head and described above. There are multiple confirmed sources placing Sickert in France for a month and on specifically days from relatives, friends and others, versus absolutely nothing showing he was in England (other than Cornwell’s unproven and at times laughable claims that he wrote letters that were mailed from there. One letter she tries to use is generally considered to be a 20th century forgery… more poor research on her part).

12

That was one of the most irritating parts of the book. She continually said “Nobody can prove that Sickert wasn’t (in England/writing the letters/basing his paintings on the Ripper killings/whatever),” as if (even if correct) that assertion proved that he was.

13

Dan Norder:

They are not, but if Sickert was demonstrably in France during these murders it’s a moot point. What we’re left with is an indictment of Sickert as a strange fellow obsessed with the murders for his own reason — that he wrote some of the Ripper letters and that he wove references to the murders (or at least murders of women in general) into some of his paintings.

14

As I had heard and read Cornwell’s claims of forensic expertise and professional experience I was going to ask if anybody whose case she had worked on had used her preposterous Sickert claims and patently sloppy work as a basis for their own appeals but then I looked her up.

So she is, basically, a blowhard, eh? It explains a lot.

[aside] Reichs, it turns out, used to teach at my alma mater and is played on the new Bones series by the totally hot Emily Deschanel. I’m not going to apologize for that school or call it a “cheesy land-grant college” anymore. [/aside]

15

Didn’t she destroy one of his paintings in an attempt to prove her case?

16

No. The damaged painting was not deliberately damaged.

17

I’m sorry, I should have been more clear-she was so over-zealous in her attempt to prove something that in her quest, she damaged an irreplaceable piece of art.

What exactly was the story there?

18

A painting of Sickert’s she had purchased to examine was damaged in transit.

19

If Sickert were a better painter it might have been more tragic. As it is…meh.

20

After going through the Wikipedia, I would say that the greatest strike against Sickert being the man is that he was well-educated and had friends.
The two bits of writing which appear to actually possibly be from the fellow (the From Hell letter and the graffiti) are both written in Cockney instead of standard English.

The Ripper was most likely not someone famous nor well-educated.

Did Sickert maybe write some letter? Possible–but who cares?
Did he aid the real Ripper? Highly doubtful. While there are serial killer duos and such in the past, I fail to see a Whitechappel low-class murderer and an artist with an interest in the morbid to happen to randomly meet, then for the artist to just go, “Hey, while you’re at it, hows about I join you. I’ve been fixing for some broiled uterus!”