Portrait of a killer Jack the Ripper-- case closed by Patricia Cornwell

Author:Patricia Cornwell
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780786540051
Publisher: New York : Putnam's, 2002.
Published: 2009-12-25T20:00:00+00:00

One Ripper communication received by the police on October 18, 1889, is on an eleven-by-fourteen-inch sheet of azure laid foolscap writing paper, the lettering first drawn in pencil, then beautifully painted over in brilliant red. Apparently no one thought it unusual that a lunatic or an illiterate or even a prankster would elaborately paint a letter that reads:

Dear Sir

I shall be in Whitechapel on the 20th of this month - And will begin some very delicate work about midnight, in the street where I executed my third examination of the human body.

Yours till death Jack the Ripper

Catch Me if you can

PS, [postscript at the top of the page] I hope you can read what I have written, and will put it all in the paper, not leave half out. If you can not see the letters let me know and I will write them biger.

He misspells bigger as an illiterate would, and I don't believe the glaring inconsistency in a letter such as this one was an accident. Sickert was playing one of his little games and showing what "fools" the police were. An alert investigator certainly should have questioned why someone would correctly spell "delicate" and "executed" and "examination" and yet misspell the simple word "bigger." But details that seem so obvious to us now have the benefit of hindsight and the analysis of art experts. The only artist looking at those letters then was the artist who created them, and many of his letters are not letters at all, but professional designs and works of art that ought to be framed and hung in a gallery.

Sickert must have thought he had no reason to fear that the police would notice or question the artwork in his taunting, violent, and obscene letters. Or perhaps he assumed that even if a shrewd investigator like Abberline picked up on the uniqueness of some of the letters, the path would never lead northwest to 54 Broadhurst Gardens. After all, the police were "idiots." Most people were stupid and boring, and Sickert often said as much.

Nobody was as brilliant, clever, cunning, or fascinating as Walter Sickert, not even Whistler or Oscar Wilde, neither of whom he enjoyed competing with at dinners and other gatherings. Sickert just might not show up if he wasn't going to be the center of attention. He didn't hesitate to admit that he was a "snob" and divided the world into two classes of people: those who interested him and those who did not. As is typical of psychopaths, Sickert believed that no investigator was his match, and as is also true of these remorseless, scary people, his delusional thinking lured him into leaving far more incriminating clues along his trails than he probably ever imagined.

The distant locations associated with a number of Ripper letters only added to the supposition that most of the letters were hoaxes. Police had no reason to believe that this East End murderer might be in one city one day and in another the next.

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