How Ripperology Works

We're about to enter some grizzly territory. Let's talk about Jack the Ripper, shall we? Indeed? Okay, so specifically, could Jack the Ripper have been an artist? Ah the artists formerly known as Jack the Ripper a k a. One Walter Sickert, a British impressionist painter. He would have been twenty eight around the time of the famous Ripper murders,

also called the Canonical murders. These take place back from August thirty one November nine, just as had the scene for you, and it would have been more than just doves crying and that dank and depraved east end of line done in the Whitechapel District. It would have been the sound of prostitutes. Um More specifically, his prey of choice was the alcoholic, drunk, middle aged and unattractive prostitutes. It's the unattractive part that really gets you, you know.

I mean, it's bad enough as it is, but unattractive to the problem is is Jack the Ripper was never caught, and as such, a kind of field of amateur investigation called ripparology has grown up over the centuries um of people who dedicate their time trying to figure out who Jack the Ripper was, right, right, right, And over the years police departments in London to have fingered about a hundred seventy suspects in the case, but no one's ever

been definitively convicted of the crime. And back in two thousand two, someone who wasn't even a real ripparologist sort of took a stab at the case, no pun intended, and that was crime novelist Patricia Cornwell. And she was the one who named Walter Sickert. And she had you know, um, hard evidence and some sort of I don't know, loosely based evidence, and the loosely based evidence was sort of

relevant to her to her interpretation of Secrets art. Now actually, um, yeah, she considered some of Secrets paintings confessional, like he had actually painted, um or used the murdered prostitutes that he murdered as models for some of his paintings, and that that um, he was either tawning police or getting this off his chest through these paintings, or he could have been super authentic because he was taught under the school

of American painter James Whistler, who recommended that secret paint from life. So, um, if you wanted to paint dead prostitutes only made sense. Awesome first, what better way to

do it than? Yeah than that? Now? Actually, in a nine FBI psychological profile of Jack the Ripper, um, one of the one of the points they concluded was that the Ripper probably would have um either gotten some of his rage out in between murders by drawing pictures of brutalized women, are writing, you know, fantasy stories about brutalizing women, so sicker kind of fits that bill. But really, one of the problems with basing your theory on art is

that artists so widely open to interpretation, especially impressionism. Yeah, and that's what's kind of wild about this point of Cornwell's argument. The painting that she was using as her most damning evidence was called the camed in Town Murder, and this featured a man sitting on the edge of a bed and while he's dressed, there's a woman in bed whose neket and ostensibly dead, and she was saying, look, look, this is it, y'all. This is the ultimate tantamount confession.

But another critic pointed out that the painting has an alternate title, and that is what shall we do for rent? Right? So the the murderer and murdered woman go uh to a desperate couple down on their luck, just with the change of the time, right right, very here, scu a tonue.

She she didn't base her theory entirely on her interpretation of secrets, though she actually um with her vast millions um purchased some paintings to try to find clues and actually tore one apart, which the curator of the Royal Academy in London later called monstrously stupid publicly um that action.

But she also had some hard evidence. Yeah, she has an empty DNA in her bag, mitchondrial DNA and the glitch with this is that monicondrial DNA only comes from our mother's lineage, so it's discounting your your father's and put into you essentially, So using that to confirm the identity of someone is only half right. It's and it turns out it left about fifty thou people in London at that time it could have produced a match. Strangely though,

one of them was Walter Sicker. And the way she found a match was she compared um some secrets DNA with DNA samples taken from the Ripper letters. Now, from the time of the murders till about nineteen sixty, hundreds of letters came in ostensibly written by Jack the Ripper. Um. Most ripperologists don't think he out any of them. But um, she Cornwell found that Secret had written one or two of them. Uh. Now she kind of jumped to a conclusion saying that you know, in her opinion that meant

he was the Ripper. But uh a ripperologist, um kind of put it into perspective. Thanking Cornwell for all of her hard work and research improving that Walter Secret was indeed one of the people who wrote fraudulent Jack the Ripper letters so well, that was rather tongue in chic and if you want to learn more about this case, there's so much more to learn. Check out Could Jack the Ripper have been an artist? On how stuff works dot com? For more on this and thousands of other topics.

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