Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper -- Case Closed

Rating:
Summary: Case Closed? Not Even Close!
Review: This book was filled with speculation, unsubstantiated rumors, unsupported suppositions and pure conjecture. Cornwall owes the family a big apology.

Rating:
Summary: DISAPPOINTMENT
Review: I was thrilled to get another Cornwell book, and especially a Ripper one! My sister and I have read every single Cornwell as soon as we can get our hands on it; in fact it has become a contest to see who gets it first. Unfortunately, I won this one!

Since I am a teacher, I automatically notice grammatical errors. In fact, if there are too many, I actually get stressed out. (I guess it's because I want to go get a red pen.) They distract me from the flow and comprehension becomes more of a task than the leisurely relaxation I seek out in a book. I deduced that the editing crew who usually works on her books must be different, or too stressed themselves.

Of course, they could possibly just have been bored! The book may be of interest to psychology students, if they look past the repetitiousness.

I am hoping my sister, a nurse in the psych dept. of the local hospital, gets some enjoyment from it. I quit forcing myself to read it, even though it is by my favorite author, Patricia. I will just re-read an old one, in anticipation of another. FICTION PLEASE!

Rating:
Summary: A one star book only.
Review: So many assumptions, from such little factual basis, made this book a very difficult read. I expected much more . A very disappointing book that, sadly, I cannot recommend. The book seemed disjointed, unorganized in its thought process, it just did not flow and was, frankly tough to finish. The pictures were interesting but could have been tied in with the text to make their reference much easier. Like the authors fiction, hope she gets back to it.

Rating:
Summary: Patricia has almost nailed the ripper
Review: I really enjoyed this book. Patricia has got the right person, I believe. She just doesn't have enough proof to conclude her case.
I have read many books and articles, and watched numerous crime programmes that deal with forensics and in particular, criminal Profiling. Indeed, this book refers to one particular trait of this type of Killer that made an impression on me with regard to solving the ripper case: trophy taking.

We know that body parts were removed in certain of the killings. As Patricia shows, Sickert was a very intelligent man and we would never expect him to be foolish enough to keep tangible proof that would link him to the crimes, not even at the turn of the 20th century. He was brazen enough to create artwork that "explored" the killings in a way that he could easily explain away as professional curiosity if he was ever confronted. I believe Patricia needs to look deeper at his art - indeed, within his art, when (or if) this book is updated.

Ancient Egypt could be the final link for Patricia to prove Sickert was the killer.
Did you know that in Europe - from the middle ages until late Victorian times - the remains of ground up mummies were used for Fertiliser, fuel, medicinal purposes and, more interestingly, by artists, as paint pigment. I believe the name of the pigment was called "Mummeia", mummy brown, or something similar. I heard about the latter two uses on a late-night BBC radio 4 programme, last year. The programme claimed that many famous artists did use this particular pigment. Reference is also made in several books too, including: Colour: travels through the paintbox, by Victoria Finlay.
Sickert almost certainly knew of this pigment and may even have used it himself.
Moving on slightly, I believe it is perfectly feasible that Sickert could have created his own pigment in the same way, ie using dried-out, ground-up human remains (his trophies), rather than blood. That way he would be able to have his trophies around him, for him to enjoy, but with no risk of him being discovered. I don't know whether DNA is recoverable from this type of pigment, but if it is, Patricia's team might be able to match the DNA to the bodies that are buried in London. I know it is a long-shot, but it is a possible way to link the victims to Sickerts work: the work is his, he created it and perhaps he used his "tokens" within it? We know that not all the bodies had parts removed from them, so it should narrow the field down to a few potential DNA matches. Also, the date on a particular painting might have a relationship with a specific murder that was committed closely before the painting was produced. At the very least, Patricia might be able to show that there are human remains in his work, something else to add to the "circumstantial" evidence against Sickert.

Rating:
Summary: Pat the Joker
Review: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed made me laugh so hard that I cried, so I had to give the book at least 2 stars. I don't know if Cornwell came up with her art critiques by herself, or if it was one of her "Team" (incidentally, her impressively large Team takes up just over two pages worth of solid credits). Either way, the "evidence" she derives from reading meaning into Walter Sickert's art is absurd. For example, in Sickert's sketches, what Cornwell describes as a "crouching, frightening-looking man who is about to spring on a woman", I see as a crouching, frightenED-looking man tip-toeing *away* from a woman.

But even if Cornwell's unconvincing analysis of Sickert's art as depicting terrible violence is correct, so what? As Cornwell herself explains later in the book, the Ripper murders "made the covers of tabloids" and "artists rendered sensational, salacious depictions of the murders". So ... perhaps Jack the Ripper was not *one* artist, but many!

One very enjoyable aspect of this book is that it is an account *of* a celebrity, written *by* a celebrity. This is a rare treat indeed!

Cornwell the celebrity belongs to the inner-sanctum of wealthy and well-connected crime writers, and she wanders through her book buying up artefacts and pieces of "evidence" that most people would be happy just to look at in a museum. She is also something of a namedropper, and clearly loves trotting out technical terms just for the sake of it (for instance, Sickert's studio "would not have eluded the scanning electron microscope, the ion microprobe, the x-ray diffractometer, or thin-layer chromotography" - if *only* his crimes had been committed 100 years later!)

One thing I do admire about the book is Cornwell's vivid recreation of time and place. The historical information about London's East End in the 1880s is detailed and intriguing (although I have no idea how accurate the information is).

At the end of the day, I find speculation regarding the identity of Jack the Ripper about as useful as arguments over the identity of the person who may or may not have written Shakespeare's plays. Afterall, *someone* did the deeds. Someone with certain skills and character traits, who lived at a certain time in a certain place. Someone who is dead. Someone whose work we'll never see the likes of again. Does it really matter *who* that someone was? It makes no difference to me.

Rating:
Summary: Back to the bookstore
Review: I very seldom, if ever, re-sell a book. But this Cornwell book was one big disappointment. Not only did she fail miserably to make a convincing argument for her theory on Jack the Ripper, she did it in the most tedious and boring way. Arrrrgh. Of all the "candidates" for Jack the Ripper, her theory is the weakest and certainly not up to the investigative work she writes into her fictional Kay Scarpetta. I have always enjoyed Ms. Cronwell's books, but this one goes back on the market. What a waste.

If you want to read a more compelling and convincing theory, pick up The Diary of Jack the Ripper by Maybrick.

Rating:
Summary: I nearly slit my throat
Review: I nearly slit my throat trying to read this poorly written, disorganized, and disappointing book! It appears as if not one word was edited out of this ridiculous, plodding tome that could have been one third its current size. The book reads as if Cornwell took all of her voluminous research notes, taped them all together, and just typed it up using some kind of stream-of-consciousness technique known only to her. The fake sepia-tone illustrations have lost a great deal of important detail seemingly for the sake of a better uniformly "artsy-fartsy" look. Many of the important primary documents would have been more convincing and much easier to see if they had been carefully and professionally photographed. Cornwell jumps around, not necessarily discussing events in chronological order, with many irrelevant asides thrown in between the important points she is trying to make. She discusses probable additional victims, yet doesn't bother to provide any kind of comprehensive, dated timeline or chronology for the reader to refer to. The same kind of timeline or chronology should have been provided for the most important of the hundreds of letters the Ripper allegedly wrote. All of that said, I believe that Sickert did the awful deeds, but I don't think Cornwell even came close to making a case. It may be in there somewhere, but someone else will have to find it, and rewrite the book. I hope someone from Scotland Yard takes up the ball. Because I'm a librarian, I know this is classified as a non-fiction book; but then, mythology is non-fiction too.

Rating:
Summary: Case Closed? Emphatically NO!
Review: The Whitechapel murders committed by Jack the Ripper in the autumn of 1888 have fascinated and repelled ever since. To the point now where it ranks with the Marie Celeste and The Bermuda triangle as one of the worlds most perplexing mysteries.

According to the blurb, "Patricia Cornwell has applied the rigorous discipline of twenty-first century police investigation to the extant material". "An excellent idea" you might think, and you'd be right. But there are so many things wrong with this book that I hardly know where to start. Ms Cornwell takes as her hypothesis that the Impressionist artist Walter Richard Sickert was in fact the notorious serial killer who has become the stuff of modern nightmares and goes all out to prove it. As part of her evidence she presents Sickert's "Camden Town Murders" series of paintings, not as the artist exploring his obsession with the murder of a prostitute in Camden, around the corner from where Sickert was living at the time, but with the artist recalling (or perhaps gloating?) about the Ripper murders some twenty years earlier and maybe his part in them. She compares facial mutilation inflicted on Jack the Ripper's fourth victim, Catherine Eddows with the play of the light on the face of the woman in one of Sickert's paintings and uses this to claim that Sickert was drawing from memory.

Well, I'm sorry Ms Cornwell, that horse just won't run! You're hypothesis falls down in several crucial areas,

· The Psycho-Sexual Serial Killers is indeed "Mr Nobody", excessively so! Killing is their only expressive outlet. Aesthetic young artists don't tend to turn to butchery in order to satisfy their needs in this regard, their art more than fulfills this.

· Sickert's use of prostitutes as models is also held up to scrutiny, but this was normal for artists of the impressionist school. Degas, Renoir, Manet and many of Sickert's contempories used prostitutes as models and not only them. Raphael painted his Madonna's from the prostitutes of Rome and the faces of Botticelli's angels are those of the rent boys of Quattro cento Florence.

· Ms Cornwell claims to have found DNA from one of the Ripper letters that can be matched to Sickert. But this sample was taken from a "Possible" Ripper letter, (opinion on its authenticity is divided) and not from the genuine articles in the black museum, which have been heat sealed, thus destroying any possibility (with current technology anyway) of obtaining a sample. Considering Sickert's prolific letter writing and collection of pseudonyms the possibility of him having written a hoax letter at the time can not be ruled out

· The artist's alleged hatred of women is shown up in a letter he wrote to Jacques-Emile Blanche when he was painting nudes in Venice at the beginning of the twentieth century "From 9 to 4, it is an uninterrupted joy, caused by these pretty, little, obliging models who laugh and un-embarrassedly be themselves while posing like angels. They are glad to be there, and are not in a hurry." This doesn't sound like a serial killer describing the objects of his desires, but rather like a normal man having fun.

· Ms Cornwell's assertion that Sickert was infertile is all but destroyed by the fact that Sickert almost certainly fathered a child by Mme. Augustine Villain a fishmonger he lived with during his time in Neuville.

· MS Cornwell states in this book that Sickert's paintings are clearly of the Ripper murders, but as with everything else, people see what they want to see. "Wolf Vanderlinden" in his excellent essay put this very well. "In The Camden Town Murder, also titled What Shall We Do For the Rent? (circa 1908). The painting is of a man sitting on the edge of a bed, eyes downcast. Behind him lies a naked woman. With the title The Camden Town Murder, the woman is obviously dead and the man is either her killer, filled with remorse, or her lover who has found the body and who sits in stunned mourning. Change to the alternate title - What Shall We Do For the Rent? - and now the picture is totally different. The man sits on the bed feeling the weight of his financial problems while his wife or girlfriend lies next to him, her hand gently resting on his knee, offering him some small, tender support"

· Ms Cornwell states that Walter Sickert always drew from life, things he'd seen and in that she'd absolutely right. Walter Sickert only painted subjects that he had seen or had seen photographs of, a subtle but significant difference. Photographs of Jack the Ripper's last two victims were published in France as far back as 1899 in a book about the crimes of Joseph Vacher, the so-called French Ripper. At that time Sickert was living in France and was fluent in the French language. Is it unreasonable to assume that Sickert, a true crime buff from his boyhood could have owned or seen a copy of that book in the 6 years between it's publication and the painting of the first of the "Camden Town Murders" series that Ms Cornwell bases so much of her theory on?

I suppose that the central problem with this book is that the author has made up her mind before she boots up her word processor and spends the book trying to convince the reader that she's right rather than weighing up the evidence and exploring any possible alternatives.

Rating:
Summary: Where is the Cornwell I enjoyed reading
Review: Ms Cornwell book on Jack the Ripper does exactly what other reviews have stated! It is not laid out logically so the reader can easily follow her evidence and research She jumps around and appears to force down her opinion on who Jack the Ripper was I didn't finish her last book and I almost didn't finish this one! Very sad I truly enjoyed her first efforts at writing where she researched the forensic side of crime I thought I'd give this book a try but am very disappointed She should look at Bob Snow's book "Searching for Carol Beckwith" and see how well the format and lay out is and how the reader prefers to make their own conclusions

Rating:
Summary: By Far the Worst JtR Casebook Ever!
Review: I couldn't even finish this book. Cornwell broke the cardinal rule of scientific investigation: she started with a THEORY, and tried to find evidence to support it, rather than starting with the evidence and trying to build a theory that matches all of it. Every other paragraph contained something like "Well I have absolutely no proof, but it's certain that X did Y." How wrong can you get?! For someone like Cornwell, who prides herself on her realism and scientific truths, this book is an embarassment. I got so sick of mentally responding "can we say the word 'coincidence'?" to each sentence (i.e. Sickert painted a woman with a man coming up behind her, ergo Sickert is Jack the Ripper because his paintings show violent tendencies; Sickert spent time in France and there is a Ripper letter *supposedly* from France, ergo Sickert wrote it) that I finally just gave up, totally exasperated.

I respect and enjoy your fiction immensely, Ms. Cornwell. But don't give up your day job to write nonfiction.