Customer Reviews

Portrait Of A Killer

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Patricia Cornwell's investigation into whether British painter Walker Sickert was in fact also infamous murderer Jack the Ripper has been fascinating to follow in the media over the last year. As the essence of any good investigation is clear, accurate perception, precision, and a rigorous search for the facts and truth by objective methods, it is by these standards that Cornwell's book must be considered.

The author has accumulated an enormous amount of circumstantial evidence against Sickert, but Portrait of a Killer is amateurishly written, sloppily executed, and poorly edited. For a famous crime writer, Cornwell has produced a weak book unlikely to stand up to scrutiny or survive the brunt of attacks by Ripperologists the world over, written as it has been for the uncritical light reader. Every facet of Portrait of a Killer seems rushed, as though Cornwell wrote with little consideration for structure and then submitted the manuscript without rereading, rewriting, or thinking it through as a whole. The awkward title alone suggests Cornwell's hesitations: 'Portrait of a Killer / Jack The Ripper / Case Closed.' Why not 'Walter Sickert: Portrait of a Killer,' or 'Walter Sickert: Jack The Ripper?' Why the reservation about damning her subject in the title, as she does so heartily in the text?

For Cornwell damns Sickert before she's made her case, and from the first page. She immediately refers to Sickert as a killer as if this were an objective fact, and as a 'psychopath,' a phrase she bandies about loosely and without proper definition throughout the book. By contemptuously referring to his rented East End studios as 'ratholes' upon their first mention, Cornwell makes her biases entirely clear. As a result, Sickert's habit of long walks become 'obsessive walks,' and his love of walking at night becomes evidence of his psychopathology, when night walking was also the habit of Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Paul Bowles, Walt Whitman, Thoreau, and Charles Baudelaire. Sickert's penchant for watching and studying people is also interpreted as a sign of his predatory madness, rather than as an attribute common to most visual artists, actors, and writers - to say nothing of detectives and crime writers. Describing a poem sent to the police and signed 'Jack the Ripper' which she believes was written by Sickert, Cornwell describes the poem's rhymes as "not those of an illiterate or deranged person." Since she believes Sickert was a "psychopath," by what criteria was he a "psychopath" but not a "deranged person?" Cornwell says of the broken, middle-aged Sickert, "He subsisted in filth and chaos. He was a slob and he stank," but on the next page states, "he traversed the surface of life as a respectable, intellectual gentleman."

The same easy logic the author uses to turn the lights on Sickert could be used on anyone, at anytime. Cornwell has been obsessed with and made a career of criminal behavior, death, and murder herself; by her own what - makes - madness equation, shouldn't she explain her own morbid preoccupations to the reader?

In light of the many sound accomplishments found here, it's unfortunate how many errors in judgement Cornwell has made, especially if "staking her career" on this volume as she says she is. Sickert is portrayed on any number of pages as manipulative, bizarre, cunning, misogynistic, treacherous, desperate for attention, and dangerously arrogant - Cornwell states these are facts about his character - but provides almost no sources for her information, when this should have been scrupulously documented. The worst others have to say about Sickert comes to almost nothing. Under oath, former teacher Whistler says, "Walter has a treacherous side to his character," his first wife's sister, who clearly disliked Sickert, perhaps with good reason, says "they cannot know what he really is as you do," and Clive Bell refers to him a man of "no standards." In exaggerated fashion, Cornwell calls Sickert a "master of disguise" - a master, not just an afficionado - but again provides no sources.

Viewing early drawings by Sickert-or, she admits, perhaps drawn by his father-Cornwell believes she already sees clear evidence of a woman-hater and a violent, disturbed mind. But when the reader refers to these drawings, the figures are hardly more than stick figures; one male figure Cornwell ominously perceives as "about to spring" at a defenseless woman looks more like a hemorrhoid sufferer hesitantly lowering himself onto a cold toilet. Yet two Ripper letters containing drawings obviously done by a talented hand are called "crude." An in-profile caricature of a woman is said to have "an ugly mole" on the nose, but the "mole" is clearly just an oversized, if still unsightly, nostril. Readers will get the sense that one thing Cornwell isn't is a visual artist, a race she seems to have little understanding of or sympathy with.

Sickert's relationships with his wives is barely touched upon until the end, and what first wife Ellen thought about her husband, whom she loved until her death, is never made clear. Since Cornwell believes Sickert was impotent all his life and perhaps left without a penis after three traumatic childhood surgeries, the reader should know a great deal about his marital life, and what his wives felt about marrying a man only to discover a eunuch in their honeymoon beds.

Cornwell, in sadly PC fashion, quotes her mentor Dr. Marcella Fierro as saying "a woman has the right to walk around naked and not be raped or murdered." In the theoretical and idealized Garden of Eden of liberalism, that certainly may be the case. Reality, again, is something else. Cornwell embarrasses herself by stooping so low to make an unnecessary case for the Ripper's desperate, tragic victims.

The author should have spent several more years on this book and then written a scholarly, definitive account of her presently unfinished investigation. Why the rush to publication? Cornwell's errors and misjudgements throughout will only raise powerful doubts about her methods and conclusions, and prejudice the reader against the more solid fruits of her labor.

Ms. Cornwell spent six million dollars of her own money researching Jack the Ripper, and the result is this book. Did she really close the case? Unfortunately, no.

Walter Sickert was in France while at least four of the five canonical murders took place. There are nearly a half-dozen independent sources, that we know of, that attest to this fact. Only one of those sources, a letter, is mentioned by Cornwell, and then summarily dismissed because there was no post-mark to prove when it was sent.

Ms. Cornwell claims to have found a match between Sickert's DNA and the Ripper. This is not true. She found a sequence of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) on both letters signed "Jack the Ripper" and letters written by Walter Sickert. This is an important distinction. mtDNA, unlike nuclear DNA (which was not found on any of the correspondence), is not unique. A particular mtDNA sequence can be shared by anywhere between 1% and 10% of the population. Ignore the countless problems of DNA contamination and provenance that comes with examining documents over a century old, and you still have the problem that these "Ripper letters" are known to be hoaxes (nearly 600 of them were sent to the press and police from all corners of the globe in 1888 and beyond). On top of that, Sickert's DNA no longer exists - he was cremated after his death. There is no way to tell whether the mtDNA found on Sickert's letters was his, his wife's, a friend's, or that of any of a thousand researchers and students who have handled them in the past sixty years.

Although Patricia claims that the evidence she has amassed would be enough for a jury in 1888 to say "Hang him!", I have to disagree. At best, she has found partial evidence to suggest that perhaps Walter Sickert hoaxed one or more Ripper letters. But even if that were proven beyond the shadow of a doubt, there is nothing to suggest that these "Ripper letters" were actually from the murderer. Most students of the case believe them all, with the possible exception of the "From Hell" letter, to be hoaxes.

I would suggest that readers interested in the case pick up Phil Sugden's "Complete History of Jack the Ripper", which was just recently reprinted in paperback. Alternatively, you can check out the web site "Casebook: Jack the Ripper," which contains a great deal of information on Cornwell's book, Walter Sickert, and all manner of Ripper-related topics.

Ms Cornwell starts the book by calling Walter Sickert a murderer, and continues the theme throughout. Unfortunately, she fails utterly to provide any evidence at all of his involvment in the Ripper murders, or any other murder for that matter. Stridency and repetition do not constitute proof.

What most shocked me about the book was what was missing from it. A key point of her theory about Walter Sickert was his apparent impotence. Ms. Cornwell fails anywhere in the book to mention a certain Joseph Sickert, who maintains to this day to be Walter's illegitimate son. A bit of a hole in her theory that needs to be addressed. Either she was unaware of his existence (unlikely as she discusses the Dr. Gull/Masonic conspiracy, which was published in 1976 by Stephen Knight, who is also not mentioned in the book or bibilography, and which was based on allegations made by Joseph Sickert) or she made a deliberate decision to not mention him. The one case indicates an appalling lack of basic research, which casts doubt over the rest of her assertions; the second indicates either an inability to refute his claim or a cowardly refusal to challenge someone who is alive and able to file the defamation suit that Walter Sickert can't.

Ms. Cornwell also fails to credit, or even mention, Jean Overton Fuller, who nominated Walter Sickert as Jack the Ripper in 1990 based on exactly the same artistic grounds that Cornwell uses.

Ms. Cornwell states that she can't prove Sickert was in London in Sept 1888, but can find no proof he wasn't. Again, she must not have looked very hard. Sickert was on his usual summer vacation with his family in France in Sept, proved by letters from his mother, his wife, and Jacques Emile Blanche. This should be particularly embarassing for Cornwell as she quotes from Blanche heavily throughout the rest of the book.

I am not a Ripper expert. All of the above information I was able to find on the Internet in a matter of a hour or so.

The book has been called poorly edited by other reviewers. I suspect that the editing style is deliberate; to hide the complete lack of any sustance to her allegations.

This book is simply terrible. Corwell piles up a number of "could have beens," "maybes," and "we can never know for sures" and finds that these speculations add up to her suspect being Jack the Ripper. She proudly states at one point that a Scotland Yard Official would have presented her evidence to the Crown Prosecutor. I would suggest the Crown Prosecutor would laugh the the official out of the office and suggest counseling.

What is most disturbing is that Cornwell dismisses previous efforts to identify the subject as speculative and relying on flawed notions of personality types. She indicts Sickert largely based on a psycho-babble interpretation of his lifestyle and drawings. This effort seems to me to be a 21st Century version of the phrenology which disgusts her in reviewing 19th and 20th Century efforts to identify the Ripper.

I could go on about the the substantive weaknesses as they are legion, but suffice to say, as an attorney, I could have Sickert out without presenting a case. As a former state's attorney I wouldn't bothering bringing charges. She often tries to anticipate what a defense attorney would do with her evidence. She simply shows how little she knows about defense attorneys. Her "evidence" would be shredded by any competent attorney.

From a literary standpoint, Cornwell seems to follow a lose chronology of the killings and then throws in whatever sticks to the wall: A little wife abuse here, a little deformity there, and mix it all with the fact that Sickert had a strange and dark personality (how strange for an artist) and sprinkles liberally throughout the book. She may have made an in depth analysis of these matters, but the information is so loosely presented in such a poorly organized manner that I had long since stopped caring by the end of the book.

This book is substantively weak, organizationally chaotic, and tinged with such presumptions of superiority and righteousness on behalf of the author that the final product really should not have been published. I enjoyed Cornwell's first few books, but stopped reading them because it became obvious that either her talent had peaked or she was mailing in the newer books. I tooks a chance on this book based on an review. I feel like suing the reviewer for the $7.99 I spent on the book. I'd have a better chance of winning that case than Cornwell would winning hers.

This is without a doubt the worst book on Jack the Ripper that I have ever had the misfortune ro read. And, masochist that I am, I struggled through 342 pages, hoping to find some redeeming quality--some sort of smoking gun...er...bloody knife, that is, that could give this work some grounds for its pretentious "Case Closed" title.

Why was it so bad? Because the way Pat Cornwell jumps to conclusions about gave me whiplash. Her favorite words, apparently, are 'could' and 'perhaps'. As in, (paraphrasing), "He could have worn disguises." Nothing to back it up, mind you, just a 'could have'. And that 'could have' becomes gospel truth for the rest of the book. He could have done this, he could have done that. Perhaps he did this, perhaps he did that.

Where is the evidence? Where is objectivity?

Granted, evidence is scarce in the Ripper case, and so much has been poured and sifted through many, many times before. But as I read this book, I got the strong, overriding impression, that Cornwell found her suspect first--and *then* built a case to fit, rather than examining the case to find a suspect. And all of the gaps of logic, leaps of faith, could have's, and perhaps's fill in the gaps, otherwise she wouldn't have had a book.

The much hyped DNA evidence she depends on basically relies on letters that flooded London in those days, both to police and newspapers and others. The vast majority are thought now, and were thought then to be hoaxes. Many different handwritings, pieces of stationary, locations the letters were sent from.

Pat believes that all, or nearly all of them, are real, and all of them come from her favored suspect, Walter Sickert. Apparently Mr. Could Have can do just about anything, from being a master of disguise, to being a master of disguising his handwriting and writing a vast amount of letters in all different styles. What a clever boy, he is.

DNA has supposedly been found that links Walter Sickert to the Ripper letters. This is crucial to her thesis, so they cannot be hoaxes in her opinion. She waffles on about the DNA evidence throughout the book, here and there, but really only gets into it for about ten pages or so.

I'll save you money by quoting her findings (if only someone else had done me the same service):

"At best we have a 'cautious indicator' that the Sickert and Ripper mitochondrial DNA sequences may have come from the same person."

Hardly sounds like "case closed" to me. And that is Pat putting the best face on it. The spine of her case, and it can't be proven. And even if it was, would that make Sickert the Ripper, or, more likely, one of the many hoaxers of the time, instead?

Pat also seems to link every single murder case in Europe to Jack the Ripper's door, all over England, to France, to Italy. Never mind the different MO's. Never mind the different victimologies. While it is true that a killer can change MO's, styles, change his victim prefrences, its not that likely, is it?

Pat will pick a murder case, seemingly from a hat, and mention it on one page 'such and such was killed here etc etc', describe the details, and then plunge right back into her theme without *ever* tying it in or proving that it was a Ripper crime at all, much less Sickert's.

I guess all violent deaths in those days were all Jack the Ripper victims. Who knew?

I'm surprised she didn't take it farther. Extend her own logic about unsolved crimes into other areas. For instance:

Sickert COULD HAVE faked his own death in 1942, lived on, and have been standing on the Grassy Knoll in 1963 to kill JFK. His MO and victimology have changed, sure, but perhaps he was really only aiming at Jackie.

Why not? He could have done it. Perhaps he did. Its physically possible. No one can prove he wasn't there. Its a perfectly valid theory.

Oh dear, did I just give away the plot for Patricia Cornwell's sequel?

The above arguement sums up the book, really. No one can prove or disprove it, so she will write it and claim it is true.

If Walter Sickert had indeed faked his death and is still around, I'd say he would (not just could, but *would*) have one hell of a libel suit.

Save your money. Read something else!

Do not read this book if you want reliable information on the ripper case. As the CASEBOOK website on the ripper crimes argues, there is much wrong with Cornwell's evidence and her use of it. For example, she ignores evidence that her suspect Sickert was in France during the commission of several ripper crimes. She also provides absolutely no evidence that Sickert had violent tendencies or ever had any residence or spent any time in the area of the killings. Her emphasis on the ripper letters is largely useless, since there is no way to determine their authenticity.

The preimier book on the ripper is Philip Sugden's THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF JACK THE RIPPER. A trained historian, Sugden explores the vast evidence meticulously. It is really THE book to read on the ripper case.

Like many others, I was more than a little annoyed at Ms. Cornwell's effrontery in the "Case Closed" part of her title. I had a "Who in the world do you think you are??" attitude before I read a page. So before going further, I would like to commend her on her hard work, and the fine investigating she did on the late Victorian era, and depictions of the poverty stricken East End of London, particularly White Chapel.

Ms. Cornwell shows her inexperience in handling historical material by her woeful lack of sources and citations. Her opinions are just that. Her bibliography does not list one source by any of her colleagues who have devoted years of study to the case. Her villain of choice, the artist Walter Sickert, is not a new suspect, nor has all her investigation elevated him to prime suspect level. The degraded mtDNA found on an envelope enclosing a letter sent to Scotland Yard purportedly from Jack the Ripper could belong to 40,000 people in London alone as well as Walter Sickert. Ms. Cornwell refuses to believe ANY crank letters were sent to the Yard and London newspapers, that every last one was from Walter Sickert. This would entail Mr. Sickert traveling the length and breadth of Great Britain and France during a two-month period. Ms. Cornwell "proves" Sickert was in London at the time of the murders by flatly stating no one "proved" he wasn't there in spite of the fact that a contemporary letter from Sickert's wife places him in France. She places hidden meanings in his dark forbidding paintings that try as I would, I couldn't see "weapons" and "hidden faces."

All through the reading of this book, I had the uncomfortable feeling Ms. Cornwell was trying to squeeze a size 16 model into a size 8 dress, slicing off a leg here or an arm there; anything to make it fit. All to no avail.

"Portrait of a Killer: Case Closed" is poorly organized and repetitious, making it a dull read particularly the last few chapters. My conclusion is the same as many readers; too many years have elapsed. Jack the Ripper is lost in the fog of time.
-sweetmolly-Amazon Reviewer

It's almost funny, Patricia Cornwell has conned a lot of critics and her pubisher - but the reviewing public here at Amazon sees right through the garbage. Cornwell's theory about poor old Walter Sickert is so full of holes that I frequently found myself chuckling as I read.

Only allowed a thousand words here so I can't tear this book apart line by line. But here's a fun example: Cornwell points out that Jack the Ripper often used horse racing slang in his letters, even gave the cops tips on the ponies! The tie-in to Sickert is clear she says - the Ripper once referred to "Bangor Street" in a letter and there is no Bangor Street in London. But don't go away now, there is a city called Bangor in Wales which has a racecourse! Stay with old Patty now, here's the clincher, and I quote: "While I have no evidence that Sickert bet on race horses, I don't have any fact to say he didn't".
CASE CLOSED, as the cover says. Hey, while I have no evidence that Patricia Cornwell wears men's size 12 Bruno Magli shoes, I have no proof that she doesn't either - call Mark Furman.

It only gets better. Cornwell finds a guest book at some obscure coastal England bed and breakfast. The guest register was defiled and doodled in by a guest Cornwell assumes to be the Ripper many years after the Ripper murders. She points out that poor old Sickert was never seen there (he was semi-famous), and never registered there. But she's happy to spend a chapter assuming that he registered there under an alias, and disguised, decades after the Ripper murders because it was the kind of place he would have liked. CASE CLOSED!

You want evidence of a crime, folks, it's on page 184. Old Patricia found evidence that she thought might point to a London cop, not Sickert. Her reaction: "I was completely unnerved and thought my life might disintegrate right before my eyes." Looks like Ms. Cornwell had a lot at stake in nailing Sickert. Why Sickert? My guess is because he is the only one of five or six well known Ripper suspects who has no family left alive to sue Patricia Cornwell.

Oh, there's a lot of 21st century psycho babble that he hated women in spite of the fact that he kept marrying the darned creatures (as a child he had an operation on his private parts - so MAYBE he couldn't perform sexually - Cornwell doesn't know this, but she guesses). Unfortunately she accuses the Ripper of murdering a young boy too, so much for the woman-hater theory. But logic doesn't deter Kay, I mean Patricia. And there's DNA evidence too, yeah - sure, and let us pray that they're not springing convicted murderers today on DNA evidence this weak.

Listen, I'm an old Kay Scarpetta fan who has seen a huge drop-off in the quality of Cornwell's work in the past few years. I think Pat signed her Hollywoood contract and stopped working hard. The last Scarpetta novel was really bad. I'll bet a Kay Scarpetta movie is coming out soon, and I'll bet her Hollywood backers were screaming for some publicity. Well, they got it. CASE CLOSED.

The problems with this book are too many to name. What this author did was zero in on a suspect and try to link him to a crime, rather than zero in on the crime and come up with a suspect. What did she miss? A motive, placement of the suspect at ANY of the crime scenes, any proof whatsoever that the actual killer was the actual writer of ANY of the letters received by Scotland Yard, any link of the suspect to the victims, any indication that the psychological make up of the suspect necessarily means that the suspect is a killer at all, let alone THIS killer. Corwall found a straw and grasped with all her might.

But I am going to dismiss all her ridiculous character profiling, and her actually MAKING UP a medical problem (not one substantiated account of this man being unable to perform sexually). I will simply state the "if it doesn't fit, you must acquit" obviousness here: if the DNA does not place a particular suspect at the scene of the crime then you simply don't have a case. Period. Nothing further needs to be said.

Case wide open.

As a Molecular Geneticist myself, I was very interested in reading this book when I heard about the DNA evidence that was included. What an incredible disappointment! I have never seen such an example of science done badly. What little evidence that is presented (very disjointedly I might add) is drowned by the plethora of assumption and stretching of the data. There were many times I wanted to bring out my red pen to correct the atrocities in this book. I honestly do not know Patricia Cornwall's credentials beyond that she worked for a coroner (but in what capacity? It seems she must done secretarial or janitorial work to have this little knowledge of the topic). Her reasoning is extremely hard to follow, maybe because she is holding it together with such tenuous threads. I guess I would sum up this book in one word -- "aggravating." Please don't present yourself and your work as "Case Closed" when your case is not based enough on true scientific evidence and method to even bring the case to court.