- LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Best-selling
crime novelist Patricia Cornwell thinks she may have uncovered Jack the
Ripper's DNA and that it could be a match for a British artist who liked
to paint morbid scenes of violence against women.
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- In an excerpt from her forthcoming book, "Portrait
of a Killer: Jack the Ripper -- Case Closed" published in the November
issue of Vanity Fair, Cornwell said that the Ripper's DNA could be a match
with the DNA of Walter Sickert, an artist who used prostitutes as models
and who painted scenes similar to the murders committed by the Ripper,
a serial killer who terrorized London in the 1880s.
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- Cornwell said she discovered that a letter Jack the Ripper
claims to have written from Manchester on Nov. 22, 1888 had the same watermark
stationary used by Walter and Ellen Sickert after their marriage three
years earlier.
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- Sickert, who died in 1942, was cremated and no DNA of
his exists except on some letters and envelopes whose stamps he had licked.
They were compared with the DNA of the Ripper from taunting letters he
sent authorities.
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- Cornwell said that of 55 samples tested, 2 had a sequence
of numbers that came from only one person: one sequence belonged to the
American artist James Whistler with whom the German-born Sickert studied,
and the other to the person who left DNA on a stamp of a Ripper letter
sent to Dr. Thomas Openshaw, the curator of the London Hospital Museum.
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- The Whistler sequence had nothing in common with any
Ripper letter or any non-Whistler item tested. But the other sequence is
found in five samples: the front stamp of the Openshaw envelope; an Ellen
Sickert envelope (which could have been handled by her husband); the envelope
from a Walter Sickert letter; a stamp from a Walter Sickert envelope; and
a Ripper envelope with a stain that tests positive for blood.
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- Cornwell said that some of Sickert's paintings bear a
chilling resemblance to photographs of Jack the Ripper's victims and that
some of the Ripper's letters contained phrases used by Whistler that were
often mocked by his student Sickert.
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