Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper -- Case Closed (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Monday, August 6, 1888, was a bank holiday in London..." (more)
Key Phrases: curling pins, etching ground, livor mortis, Walter Sickert, East End, Scotland Yard (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Jack the Ripper was renowned artist Walter Sickert (1860-1942) according to Cornwell, in case anyone hasn't yet heard. The evidence Cornwell accumulates toward that conclusion in this brilliant, personal, gripping book is very strong, and will persuade many. In May 2001, Cornwell took a tour of Scotland Yard that interested her in the Ripper case, and in Sickert as a suspect. A look at Sickert's "violent" paintings sealed her interest, and she became determined to apply, for the first time ever, modern investigatory and forensic techniques to the crimes that horrified London more than 100 years ago. The book's narrative is complex, as Cornwell details her emotional involvement in the case; re-creates life in Victorian times, particularly in the late 1880s, and especially the cruel existence of the London poor; offers expertly observed scenarios of how, based on the evidence, the killings occurred and the subsequent investigations were conducted; explains what was found by the team of experts she hired; and gives a psycho-biography of Sickert. The book is filled with newsworthy revelations, including the successful use of DNA analysis to establish a link between an envelope mailed by the Ripper and two envelopes used by Sickert. There are also powerful comparisons made between Sickert's drawing style and that of the Ripper; between words and turns of phrases used by both men; and much other circumstantial evidence. Also newsworthy is Cornwell's conclusion that Sickert continued to kill long after the Ripper supposedly lay down his blade, reaping dozens of victims over his long life. Compassionate, intense, superbly argued, fluidly written and impossible to put down, this is the finest and most important true-crime book to date of the 21st century. Main selection of the BOMC, Literary Guild, Mystery Guild and Doubleday Book Club.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Can truth be stranger than Cornwell's fiction? Here, the best-selling novelist claims to uncover the identity of Jack the Ripper.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Putnam Adult; 1 edition (November 11, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399149325
• ISBN-13: 978-0399149320
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (612 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #346,375 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

181 of 213 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The Principle Figure In A Pageant Of Massacre?, November 15, 2002

By	J. E. Barnes (Bayridge, Brooklyn, New York) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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.

50 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars And the walls keep tumbling down ..., November 20, 2002

By	Booklover 2007 (Huntsville, AL USA) - See all my reviews

I bought "Portrait of A Killer," read it all, and was disappointed that it failed to live up to its own hype. But it's still a fascinating account of how Patricia Cornwell became yet another victim of the international Rubik's Cube known as "Who was Jack the Ripper?" She seems to have taken up some other people's theories without seriously questioning their conclusions because, after all, those people were Experts! But even an expert doesn't know everything, especially things that exist outside their own field of expertise. Here's an example. When Cornwell says that Sickert's art contains proof of his guilt, she's referring to the fact that some of his paintings contain elements which seem to echo photographs of two Ripper victims, specifically the morgue photo of Catherine Eddowes and the bedroom photo of Mary Kelly. Cornwell also claims that these photographs never appeared in print until 1972 and so, for many years, the only people who knew exactly how these women looked after death were the police and their killer.

Oh, really? Academic librarian James Bunnelle has posted a reader review at Barnes and Noble that describes a book called "Vacher l'éventreur et les crimes sadiques" by Alexandre Lacassagne, which was published in 1899. Among other ghastly attractions, it contains the first published photographs of victims murdered by Jack the Ripper, namely-you guessed it!-the morgue photo of Catherine Eddowes and the bedroom photo of Mary Kelly. Now let's see here: (a) Sickert was a news freak who was fascinated by criminality and sensationalism, (b) he often worked from photographs, and (c) he was fluent in French and moved to France a year before Lacassagne's book was published in Paris. (Can you say "reasonable doubt"?) There's a good reason why real historians don't publish wild claims until they can survive an annoying little thing called "peer review" ... namely the critical response that this book is now receiving. Read it at your library.

99 of 118 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Patricia Cornwell's six million dollar man..., November 11, 2002

By	Stephen Paul Ryder (Virginia, United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.