The Gospel According To Jack The Ripper [Part 4 of 5]

The so-called Ripper murders offer not just a fascinating rabbit hole but a veritable warren of conspiracies and possible solutions, some complimentary, some contradictory.

Plenty of fanciful speculation.

Solid evidence?  Not so much.

One of the few where there appears to be some DNA evidence of a connection -- however tenuous -- to the Ripper case is that of Walter Sickert (1860-1942), a British painter influential in the post-impressionist period.  His best known group paintings are referred to as the Camden Town nudes. 

Some speculate he painted them from an eyewitness point of view of Mary Kelly’s death -- or at least the immediate aftermath.

He pops up in a couple of overlapping Ripper theories, which I’ll boil down to their simplest basic mutual components.

Mary Kelly was specifically targeted as a potential threat to the royal family.

Sickert -- who like many artists of the era employed prostitutes as models -- helped track her down for the killer/s.

Years later, he began painting portraits and nudes that seem to reflect details found at the Kelly crime scene.  He also claimed to have briefly lodged in a room that the landlady claimed once was rented by the Ripper, going so far as to paint a picture of it with a man -- either himself or the Ripper -- standing silhouetted by a window.

To be honest, in late 19th / early 20th century Whitechapel, it would be the rare lodging house that didn’t claim to have once hosted the Ripper.

Sickert publicly obsessed over the Ripper case and other sensational crimes of the era.  The Camden Town nude series were painted and named after the 1907 murder of a prostitute in the Camden Town section of London, about 4.5 – 5 miles from the original Ripper murders nearly 20 years earlier.  A local artist was arrested and charged with the crime, but the case against him fell apart so spectacularly that the judge issued a directed verdict proclaiming his innocence from the bench.

Ripper theories involving the royal family have existed for decades, despite being repeatedly shot down by contradictory evidence.  In the 1970s, however, the so called “Royal Conspiracy” theory arose, claiming that the murderer/s didn’t come from the royal family itself but rather were trusted associates squelching an attempted blackmail scheme.

Fascinating…for fiction. 

For fact, it falls apart fast.

It was at this time that Sickert’s name cropped up as a possible finger man for the actual murderer/s. 

Who made this accusation?

None other than Jospeh Sickert, a man claiming not only to be Sickert’s own now grown son, but that his father shared the secret with him before dying in 1942. 

The problem is that Walter Sickert resided in France during the period the Nichols, Chapman, Stride, and Eddowes murders occurred.  He was briefly in England during the period Mary Kelly was murdered but there is no evidence linking him to that murder.

There is evidence linking him to one of the Ripper letters, however.

Author Patricia Cornwell in her 2002 book, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed, claims a DNA match between the infamous “From Hell, Mr. Lusk” letter of October 16, 1888 and other correspondence known to have been written by Sickert. 

In reality, the DNA in both correspondence is deteriorated by age and contaminated by careless handling over the centuries.  The best DNA testing can do is say it’s not impossible for Sickert to be among a sizeable number of people with DNA similar to that found on the Ripper letter.

As mentioned, the police at the time considered all the so-called Ripper letters to be hoaxes, but “From Hell Mr. Lusk” gets extra close attention because it accompanied part of a human kidney the writer claimed came from Catherine Eddowes.

That we have no way of proving, the specimen long since lost.  At the time police assumed a medical student -- who would have access to preserved tissue specimens -- could have mailed it as a prank. 

Assuming Cornwell is correct, the most she’s done has been to demonstrate Sickert could have written the “From Hell Mr. Lusk” letter, not that he is connected to the crime/s even as an accomplice. 

A refinement of the royal conspiracy theory would have Kelly’s murder a copy-cat cover up of a killing isolated and separate from Nichols, Chapman, and Eddowes (plus possibly Stride).

That still doesn’t link Sickert to the crime.  The so-called similarities between the Camden Town nudes and the Kelly murder can be accounted for by Sickert’s possession of a book published in France that included the first public photos of the Stride and Eddowes murders.

Sickert, known to use photographic reference for his paintings, may very well has based his Camden Town nudes on the Kelly murder scene, but as noted above there’s a wholly innocent reason how he knew those details.

Creepy, but innocent…

© Buzz Dixon