Painter was the Ripper, novelist insists

LONDON--One of America's best-known crime writers has spent $4million on research to prove a Victorian artist was Jack the Ripper,even buying some of his paintings to tear up for clues.

Patricia Cornwell believes the serial killer was Walter RichardSickert, an Impressionist artist who, 20 years after the crimes,painted a series of gruesome pictures of a murdered prostitute.

Cornwell, 45, told Diane Sawyer last week on ABC's "PrimetimeThursday" that she would stake her reputation'' on her findings.

I do believe 100 percent that Walter Richard Sickert committedthose serial crimes, that he is the Whitechapel murderer,'' she said.

Cornwell flew a team of American forensic experts to London toexamine letters believed to have been written by the killer. Shespent part of her fortune to buy 30 of Sickert's paintings, rippingup some in a fruitless search for fingerprints or blood.

"It all sounds monstrously stupid to me," Richard Shone, curatorof a 1992 Sickert show at the Royal Academy in London, told theGuardian. "Is she so obsessed that she doesn't mind the destructionof a painting by such a very fine artist to add credence to thissilly theory? If even Sickert were Jack the Ripper it would notjustify this. It's like taking a Caravaggio apart to investigate thestabbing he was involved in. It's mad."

Sickert, born in 1860, worked with Degas and is regarded as a keylink between British art and the growth of Impressionism.

But Cornwell, a former mortuary assistant and creator of the crime-solving medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, claims Sickert led a secretdouble life as a serial killer and that the five prostitutes named asJack the Ripper's victims were not the only women he killed.

Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowesand Mary Kelly were killed between Aug. 31 and Nov. 8, 1888, inLondon's East End. They were mutilated, and all but Kelly weremurdered on the street.

Sickert was 28 when the killings began. Cornwell said it wastypical for serial murderers to start their killing between 25 and30.

The Ripper disappeared rapidly after the murders. Sickert hadthree secret studios in White-chapel, giving him places to hide.

Cornwell said the key to Sickert's guilt was in his paintings,which she claims have an eerie similarity to grisly postmortempictures taken of the Ripper's victims.

Sickert painted a series of pictures in 1908, 20 years after theRipper's crimes, which he said were prompted by the murder of aprostitute. In one painting of a woman with a pearl necklace,Cornwell said the pose was almost identical to that of Kelly as shewas found by police, while another showed a woman's face mutilated bypaint in a way similar to how Eddowes was left by her murderer.

He could not have known what these women looked like if he was notthere,'' said Cornwell, who has written a book on the theory.

I am literally staking my reputation on this,'' she said. Ifsomeone proves me wrong, I will look horrible about it.''

Daily Telegraph