Walter Sickert and the Jack the Ripper Theory: Patricia Cornwell's Contested Investigation

In the late 1880s, five sex workers were murdered in London's Whitechapel district, and the unknown killer, dubbed Jack the Ripper, sent over 200 letters to police. Decades later, British Impressionist Walter Sickert, a student of Edgar Degas and James Whistler, became a suspect. His name first appeared in the Ripper investigation in the late 1950s, partly due to his strange paintings created two decades after the murders. In the early 2000s, crime novelist Patricia Cornwell set out to prove Sickert's guilt, publishing her findings in 2002 and a re-edition in 2017. She cited Sickert's childhood genital fistula surgeries as a possible trauma leading to misogyny, and claimed DNA on a Ripper letter matched Sickert, though the sample also matched up to 10% of the population. Cornwell also noted Sickert's presence near the 1907 Camden Town murder of Emily Dimmock, and similarities between his paintings and crime scene photos. However, experts dispute her evidence, pointing out that the birth defect story came from a distant relative, that Sickert was rumored to have fathered many illegitimate children, and that the DNA was inconclusive and from a letter widely considered a forgery. Sickert was cremated, so no DNA could be extracted from his body. The case remains unsolved.