TRUE CRIME Is Jack the Ripper case closed?

The author's conclusion is based on wild speculation.
By ELSBETH L. BOTHE
SPECIAL TO THE BALTIMORE SUN
"Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed," by Patricia Cornwell (Putnam, $27.95).
Rich and vainglorious from writing blockbusting detective fiction, Patricia Cornwell has applied her considerable funds and fertile imagination to the realm of true crime, choosing, as she would, history's most celebrated case. Without troubling to consult, credit or contradict a wealth of investigation over the past 114 years, Cornwell claims to have finally caught London's legendary serial killer, Jack the Ripper.
Grandiose pre-publication hype has her "100 percent sure," willing to "stake her reputation" that the works of Victorian artist Walter Richard Sickert should have hanged him on the gallows instead of on the walls of prestigious museums.
Poor Sickert! What about his reputation? A renowned Impressionist, thought by some to be the greatest painter between J.M.W. Turner and Francis Bacon, disciple of James Whistler, colleague of Edgar Degas, is transformed into a man so thoroughly vile that Cornwell would not likely see fit to create him as a credible character in one of her novels. With the Cornwell name dominating the dust jacket of a thick, authoritative-looking book, Sickert doesn't stand a chance.
Wild speculation
Cornwell's conclusion is based is on the wildest of speculation in the total absence of any kind of hard evidence -- old or newly discovered. Not that she didn't try.
Futile efforts to link Sickert and the Ripper with a DNA match included testing a surviving set of his overalls (Sickert's body had been cremated), and analyzing a huge stockpile of letters, generally regarded as hoaxes, from Ripper police archives to the consternation of the art world, as her search led to the destruction of one from Cornwell's collection of 32 Sickert paintings, said to have cost $4 million.
DNA failed. Nevertheless, Cornwell thinks it probative that three of the letters were written on stationery with the same watermark as writing paper from the Sickert household; and that others often contained the expression "Ha, Ha." That's significant, writes Cornwell, because Sickert's mentor, Whistler, had that noisome guffaw Sickert would have heard in their studio.
It makes no matter that Sickert's handwriting (he wrote a lot) doesn't resemble any on the Ripper letters. He was a genius at disguise, she claims, which also explains why his benign good looks failed to fit the varying descriptions of witnesses who thought they had seen the Ripper.
Selected paintings
Turning selected Sickert paintings into Rorschach tests, Cornwell sees mutilations on the side of a woman's face that is in shadow. On a painting that has within it a picture of a diva draped in a feather boa, she believes she detects a man looming behind the diva "whose face begins to look like a skull." No matter that computerized image enhancement failed to confirm her vision.
Cornwell is not geared to citing sources, so a reader cannot evaluate, for example, the validity of her insistence that Sickert's sex organ was mutilated or missing; instead, Cornwell diverts with pages of interesting expertise about "fistulas" and the traumatic ordeal Sickert could have undergone. But how could she possibly document florid declamations like this: "If any part of Sickert's anatomy symbolized his entire being, it wasn't his penis. It was his eyes."
In a recent New York Times interview, Cornwell laments that she took less than half of her usual $9 million advance because nonfiction doesn't have the readership her crime novels do. She was cheated.