Patricia cornwall has been on the radio quite a bit lately touting her book.
She says that she now owns about 40 Sikert paintings and there is a rumor that she destroyed one of them although she hotly denies this.
She doesn’t sound convincing on the subject. I wonder if she will make back her “investment” on the book sales.
IIRC, she bought one of the paintings so they could do various tests on it (I think they were looking for fingerprints / DNA) but when it arrived they found that it had been damaged in transit.
I think the confusion arose from this, as people thought she bought the painting with the intention of chopping it up.
Unless, of course, one or more of the killings was done by someone else and was falesly attributed. Given the police/forensic methods at the time of the crimes, this is quite possible
I feel the same way. John Douglas puts forth a new and slightly different option in his book The Cases That Haunt Us, which brings up the possibility of a David Cohen:
David Cohen was a Polish Jew . . . whose incarceration . . . fits precisely with the end of the murders. [The police] originally found him wandering at large and unable to take care of himself. Unlike Kosminski, Cohen was violently antisocial and was kept in restraints. Forthermore, Cohen was known to be in Whitechapel at the time of the murders.
Douglas then goes on to explain a little more about the possible confusion in police records of Cohen, Kosminski, and another Polish Jew named Nathan Kaminsky. It’s a distinct possibility, but I still lean towards Kosminski.
Re: Gull and the Prince:
As Douglas points out in the same book, there are several problems with that story, the Prince has alibis for each of the murders.
RR
Sorry, that last sentence was supposed to read:
As Douglas points out in the same book there are several problems with that story, not least of which is that the Prince has alibis for each of the murders.
RR
RiverRunner
Well, of course. I don’t think any credible theory has the Prince himself committing the murders. I took the London Walks “Jack The Ripper” tour last year, and the guide told us that even the Prince’s closest friends admitted he was far too stupid to have planned and committed such acts.
However, that doesn’t begin to say that others couldn’t have committed the murders on his behalf. Or really, on the Queen’s behalf.
Isn’t knowledge of the Prince’s secret marriage and child something all the victims had in common?
I just saw the last couple of minutes of that documentary on TLC … I’m not sure I buy it. Does anyone know which specific JTR letter she found the DNA match for?
Hey, I just got that book, RiverRunner! (Which is actually why I opened this thread, too.)
If they did know of a secret marriage, then they did indeed pretty much take that knowledge to the grave with them. As far as I know, nobody outside a small subset of Ripper enthusiasts takes this seriously.
The book that Exapno Mapcase is refering to as Moore’s main inspiration in From Hell is Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution from 1976. This is the origin of the Sickert/royal connection and, as I mentioned above, strongly based on the claims of someone purporting to be Sickert’s illegitimate son. (By the way, it’s no wonder Cornwell is dismissive of him: her theory has Sickert as impotent.) To give you some idea of how strongly Moore gives him any credibility, from his Appendix II (p14-15):
To me, that “obviously” is a prime example of Moore’s attitude to the whole business.
I’ve never heard anything about Eddy having a secret marriage and a child-and even then I highly doubt it.
They’re right about him being too stupid-Eddy was certainly slow and most probably mentally retarded. He would never have been able to pull something off like that without getting caught.
Besides, wasn’t he at Balmoral when it was taking place?
This one (according to http://casebook.org/dissertations/dst-pamandsickert.html):
<<The “Openshaw” letter, which according to Cornwell provided similar mtDNA sequences and watermarks to those found in Sickert’s correspondence, *has never been considered a genuine Ripper letter by any serious author or researcher. *It was sent to Dr. Thomas Horrocks Openshaw, who was widely publicized in the newspapers for having examined the piece of kidney enclosed along with the “From Hell” letter. >>
I think Cornwell’s theories are interesting, but are not much more than that. There are many other suspects just as plausible as Sickert. The case will never be solved, as it’s been too long, and too much evidence no longer exists, or was never collected in the first place.