Halloween Discussion Forums, Costumes, Horror!

Well, that is interesting. Several years ago I read a book by crime writer Patricia Cornwell, in which she argued forcefully that Jack the Ripper was most likely a German-turned-English artist named Walter Sickert. Sickert had been an actor in his youth and used the name "Nemo" in place of his own name on the playbill. Evidently "Nemo" (No Man in Latin) was linked to some of Jack the Ripper's letters. Also, as a highly trained artist, Sickert had good knowledge of anatomy and had a studio in the area where the women were murdered. Finally, Sickert seemed obsessed with those crimes and painted pictures reminiscent of several of them. He was married, but he never had children. Cornwell thinks he couldn't, due to a childhood trauma (she believes the family moved from Germany to England so he could have an operation on his private parts, which, she believes, were sexually ambiguous). The Ripper murders coincided with a time when Sickert's wife was visiting her sister in Ireland.

Cornwell claimed that there was some DNA recovered from one of the Ripper letters that at least didn't rule out Sickert, but Mike is correct that DNA degrades over time.

I guess we'll never know the answer to this mystery. There seem to be several candidates who can be made to have a strong claim.

Yes we might never know, but this reference is pretty intriguing also.

I'd love to do the Ripper tour!

I hadn't heard anything about a potential JtR who moved to NYC. Sickert lived in Paris for a while, and Cornwell claims some similar crimes happened there during his residency.

Sickert apparently was a highly respected artist and is considered by art historians to be possibly the leading English painter of his generation, so he had a position of respectability in England. Some woman who wrote her doctoral dissertation on his work confided to Cornwell, "I don't think there is anyone who has studied Sickert deeply who hasn't at least wondered if he were the Ripper."

When i've got some spare time i'm going to read up on the Sickert & JR connection. Thanks for the info Murf!

Everyone has a different Ripper suspect... and no one can prove who it was even with modern forensics because a lot of the actual evidence as since been "lost" (read: stolen by people in the police force who wanted souvenirs). I don't even think they have any DNA from the original victims to compare with any new DNA evidence.... and the bodies have probably long since decomposed in the moist English soil. It would be futile to compare DNA now-- there's nothing to compare it with.

I personally love the FBI's profile, which Scottland Yard had asked the US to do on the 100th anniversary of the case. Some great stuff in there. A very cool read.

If you're interested in reading what the FBI had to say, you can read it here:
http://vault.fbi.gov/Jack%20the%20Ripper

That was an interesting link, Jadewik! I skimmed the whole thing.

So this Jack the Ripper was first serial killer to be labeled as that kind of murderer?

It is not surprising that he never caught. I do think it would be easy to get away with mass murder like that and then simply stop killing victims.

He was the first one to be widely publicized, I guess, and he fed the flame by sending taunting letters to the police, which helped cement his reputation, I think.

Of course, the play Sweeney Todd is based on a crime that actually happened, I believe in Paris in the late 1600s, IIRC. So there have been serial killers forever.

I think big urban centers, and the anonymity of modern life, have probably made it easier for that kind of crime to happen. Also, some say the interstate system in the US exacerbated that problem--making it easy for criminals to drop in & out of a community.

My favorite serial killer is probably Ed Kemper.

My favorite almost-serial-killer is probably Ed Gein.

Li H'Sen Chang wrote:My favorite serial killer is probably Ed Kemper.

Interesting. The FBI profile seems awful generic and a bit cliched, but is probably exactly correct.