July 8, 2024 • 50 mins
Several years ago, Patricia Cornwell wrote a book about Jack the Ripper called, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed. This book presents Patricia’s opinion on his identity based on her extensive research. She believes that Jack the Ripper was a German-British artist named Walter Sickert. A controversial opinion, according to some Ripperologists. In this episode with the author, you’ll hear why.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I did not ask to write about Jack the Ripper.
I got ambushed by him, and I'm still mad at
him because I had a perfectly reasonable, sensible, nice little
life until he came along.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:53):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. Our next guest is a legend.
It's novelist Patricia Cornwell. She's one of my mother's most
(01:14):
favorite authors, and she's also a nonfiction writer and several
years ago she wrote a book about Jack the Ripper
called Portrait of a Killer. Jack the Ripper case closed.
This book is Patricia's opinion on his identity. Based on
her extensive research, Patricia believes that Jack the Ripper was
a German British artist named Walter Sickert. This is a
(01:36):
controversial opinion according to some ripperlogists. And you'll hear why again.
This is Patricia's theory. And I'm not a ripperlogist, but
I loved our conversation. Let's get started on how you
came to this story. For me, personally, I don't want
to know who it is. I don't want to know,
(01:57):
and there's so many theories out there, but you clearly
wanted to know who this was because you have done
such a tremendous amount of research.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
The fact of the matter is I was in London
in the spring of two thousand and one. I was
actually there with the Governor of Virginia and his wife
to promote the archaeological excavation of Jamestown. And while I
was there, I got an invitation to tour Scotland Yard
and that their premier investigator wanted to chat with me,
(02:25):
and he was their in house expert on Jack the Ripper,
and I thought, I'm not interested in that. I'm here
doing something else, and I'm writing Scarpetta, and I thought
it would be absolutely disrespectful for me not to go
and accept that invitation. It's an honor. So I went
over there and the investigator's name was John Greeve, and
he was towards getting ready to retire. But he started
(02:48):
telling me all about Jack the Ripper, and I'm like, okay,
but I don't know what this has got to do
with me. But I was listening, and then he said,
you know, tomorrow, I'd like to take you to Whitechapel
and I'll drive you around and i'll show you what's
left of where these crimes occurred, the ones that we
know of. Some people say they were five. Really at
(03:09):
the time it was there was at least seven in
based on other things, I know that the Ripper didn't
stop killing in the late fall of eighteen eighty eight.
He absolutely didn't. But I went on this tour with
John Grief in the rain and the cold. It was
a miserable day. I was supposed to be in Ireland,
and I canceled my trip to go do this with
him because I just thought I have to go. At
(03:31):
the end of it, I said to him, who are
the suspects, and he started rattling off some names and
I said, based on what he said, based on nothing theories.
And I said, well, what about the evidence. He said, well,
the only evidence left because nothing was really kept at
the time anyway, the only evidence would be the letters
that Jack the Ripper wrote to the police and other people.
(03:52):
And I said, what letters. I've never heard of that before.
So apparently quite a lot of them, he said, And listen,
he said, if you're going to look into this, he said,
there's this painter named Walter Sickert and his name I've
been hearing his name for a really long time. And
he painted these murder paintings and he said, and I'm
just telling you you need to look into him. So
that came from Scotland Yard. It wasn't my idea. And furthermore,
(04:14):
John Greeve, I was like a PhD student going and
sitting down with my advisor, you know. Every now and
then I'd show up and we'd go meet at some
Indian restaurant in Whitechapel and I'd pull out my big
portfolio like an artist keeps, and I'd let him go
through my latest stuff that I was gathering from the investigation,
and he was sort of the wizard behind the curtain
(04:34):
the entire time I was doing that first book, I
got to see a lot of things and do a
lot of things your average person wouldn't get to do.
But what convinced me that Walter Sickret was Jack the Ripper.
It wasn't just the art work. I mean, the artwork
was enough to give you the willies. It's like, wow,
this is weird, and his biography's strange stuff. But when
I went to see the actual letters, the real ones
(04:56):
in person, and you put them on a light box,
and then later you bring in experts and scientists and
what have you, and it was very obvious that there
were connections between Walter Sicicred's letters and Jack the Ripper's letters.
There were matching watermarks. There were the six letters out
of a total of only twenty four pieces of paper
that were handmlled with this particular water mark, and five
(05:18):
of them were two from Jack the Ripper and three
were Walter Siicard and they were written on his mother's stationary.
How's that for creepy. He cut the letter head off,
but the water mark and the paper measurements and I
had the world's foremost paper expert who was doing all this.
There's no question he wrote some of the letters, so
he would have a lot to answer for it today,
one way or other.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Will you take me through before we talk more about
Walter Sicard and you know your evidence behind all of this.
Take me through the prevalent theories I've heard, Royal family,
I have heard, you know, I mean, just it feels
like it runs the gamut. What's your understanding of the
most popular theories that have pervaded did everything for the
(06:01):
past almost one hundred and fifty years.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Well, the most popular was always the royal conspiracy, you know,
where Prince Eddie, for example, had an affair with maybe
one of the sex workers who ended up being murdered.
And interestingly enough, Walter Sickert actually has overtones or they
are echoes of him that are mixed in with this
whole royal theory because of stuff that he used to
tell people. But we'll get to that later. But the
(06:25):
point is the Royal conspiracy. It was the Queen's surgeon
was doing it. Sir William Gull was running around and
butchering these people. And by the way, he was Queen
victorious physician at that time, and he was also i think,
like in his seventies and he had stuffered a stroke.
Another theory then, of course, a prominent theory was it
(06:45):
was some insane, illuctric person who lived in the slums.
And then you get this guy named Kozminski, who DNA
supposedly later connected to a shawl that Catherine Edow's one
of the victims. She was murdered in Miter Square on
the night of the double murder in November of eighteen
eighty eight, and so the theory was suddenly this shawl
(07:07):
appears over one hundred years later, and it's claimed that
this was found at the crime scene, it was given
to a cop, it was stored in various places, and
then testing was done to see if Kominski's or somebody's
DNA was on it, and magically it was. But I'm
going to tell you right now, uh huh, No way
I know the history of that shawl. First of all,
(07:28):
I've seen the police drawing of Catherine Edel's crime scene,
and there's no big shawl like that. There's nothing in
the drawing. There's no mention in the original police reports
about a shawl that actually looks more like a tablecloth runner.
And furthermore, for a while it was stored at the
Crime Museum at Scotland Yard because it was donated there
(07:48):
and people who work there it was always being passed
around the room. They I mean, one of the persons
I know cut a piece of it out and had
it on his desk the lab that did the DNA testing.
From what I understand, I'm just going to put it
this because I don't want to get sued by anybody,
But that is not the sort of science that I'm
used to hearing being practiced. And I do not believe
in that DNA for one minute. And are you going
(08:09):
to explain to me how someone like that wrote the
letters that we've seen, because what that would tell you
is that someone like Walter Siicred or basically we know
I do know that Walter Sicred wrote at least some
of those letters. And if you look at them, you
see the hand of an artist. One of them is
a print from a wood block, you know, a face
carved in wood that's stamped in ink, that's professional looking.
(08:30):
There are so many things that point to Sicred and
the only explanation if it were some quote crazy person
like Kosminski would be if somebody like that killed these
people and then it was turned into a carnival by
some crazy person like Walter Siicard, I don't find that
very believable. For one thing, Walter Sicicred painted a painting
called Red Jack the Ripper's Bedroom, and it's the very
(08:52):
bedroom he was living in at the time when he
painted it, which is also when the Camden Town murder
happened right around the corner from another woman who with
a throat cut. This was in nineteen oh seven. So
the theories are things like that, no, it's not what
it was. It was a psychopathic killer. But not all
of them are ignorant and without resources.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
What about the argument that many of these letters have
been I guess proven. I didn't know this proven to
be hoaxes, and I know you you just sort of
addressed that that it seems ridiculous to you that Walter
Sickert has contributed to the letters that would have been
hoaxes rather than being an authentic Jack the Ripper letter.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Listen.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
I have been through every one of those letters, not
only at the National Archives but also the City of
London Archives. Because you see Katherine Edows, this person we're
just talking about who was Basically, she was disemboweled on
the sidewalk in the dark shadows of Miterer Square, where
sex workers, you know, would sometimes meet the gentlemen coming
(09:52):
out of the clubs late at night. And that's where
Katherine Edows were. She'd just gotten out of jail for
being drunk. She was so drunk she couldn't walk. And
when the constable finally led her out of the jail
after midnight for some reason, instead of heading home she
didn't really have a home, but heading back to where
she had been before, she went into Miter Square. And
(10:13):
next thing, you know, I mean, a watchman goes by
on his rounds. You could just hear the heels of
his shoes on the cobblestones, and by the time he
comes back around, like fifteen minutes later, she's there. That's
how quickly this guy struck. He cut her throat, then
he cut her all the way down through the pubic area.
He took her kidneys, or at least one of them.
(10:35):
Some organs were grabbed, her intestines and everything were dumped
out on the sidewalk. And then this whole notion that
it was a surgical thing, is blooney. There's nothing surgical
about any Objack the Ripper's incisions. There's what I call
slash and grab. The biggest thing is he probably I
believe he came around from behind them and then they
go down on the pavement and then he'd come around
the other thing and start tearing off their clothes, ripping off,
(10:56):
cutting through the clothes. These were sexual crimes, even though
there's no evidence that he had any sexual contact with
these people. His gratification came from the violence.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
One thing that's interesting is I have another show called
Buried Bones with a forensic investigator named Paul Holes, and
we've talked about that the theory, not necessarily with Jack
the Ripper, but the theory that if a victim has
been dismembered in a certain way, cut in a certain way,
that it has to be someone with medical education. And
he said, hunters know how to break down animals better
(11:27):
than just about anyone butcher's And he said even lay
people can figure it out. So I am happy to
know that that has been refuted I think by anybody
who's credible that's looked into this case. Why do you
think this case in particular for taking a pause here.
Why do you think this case in particular has been
(11:47):
something that has sparked so much controversy over this amount
of time.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
I mean, I imagine that you've had.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
People privately or publicly criticize what you're saying, because I
think everybody, anybody who's an expert in Jack the Ripper,
or when they put out something it's refuted. Do you
feel like it's understandable based on what you know about
how people are so enthusiastic about this case.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
You know what the problem with it is. Everybody thinks
they know about it, and so they're not willing to
learn anything new.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Almost.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
I would guarantee that the vast preponderance of those people
who have criticized me for my books on Jack the
Ripper never read either one of them ever, especially the
more recent one, which is not for the feinne of Heart.
It's very graphic, and it's a big book, and I
show you the evidence, you know, hundreds and hundreds of
images to let you see what it looks like, even
(12:38):
photographs of murdered victims. But I agree with you what
you said in the very beginning. People don't really want
this solved. It's kind of like the Titanic's more interesting
if it's still on the bottom of the ocean. If
you really raise the whole thing and put it in
the middle of a hangar for everybody to look at,
it would seem so mundane and it would not be
have the intrigue and the mystery Amelia air Heart. If
(13:00):
we finally find her, it won't be the same as
not finding her. It becomes this looming question of who
did this horrible thing? And when you go to the
graves of Jack the Ripper's victims, and where else do
you see on the tombstone victim of Jack the Ripper?
Two of those graves are like that at least, I mean,
(13:21):
where do you see that that? Yeah, victim of Ted Bundy.
We don't do that. That's how pervasive this was back then.
It's all because the Ripper wrote letters. He taunted the police,
he played games with them. I find myself going through
the Ripper letters and laughing out loud at times, knowing
I shouldn't because of his humor. Like there's one an
(13:43):
envelope that he tacked to a tree in a place
called bird Cage Lane in London. Tacked it to a tree,
a Ripper letter, and he drew a stamp on it
with a bird, a cartoon bird. I mean I almost
burst out laughing out loud in the public record office.
I said, is nobody notice this kind of stuff?
Speaker 3 (14:01):
He'll have a.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Little pair of scissors of where you cut along the
line like doctor Seuss does. And It's like, who is
not noticing these things?
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Now?
Speaker 2 (14:10):
I'm not saying all the Ripper letters are genuine, absolutely not.
In fact, there's only a couple hundred left that we
know of, so imagine how many there must have been
back in the day, and not only original ones, but
fake ones, hoax ones. Walter Sickert suffered from what you
probably heard of called graphamania. He was a compulsive writer
as a person. He was in fact, he used to
(14:32):
apologize to people for sending yet another letter or writing
yet another editorial for a newspaper. He couldn't stop. He
was always writing, always painting. And I believe that the
Ripper I. E. Siicert, probably wrote hundreds and hundreds, possibly
thousands of these communications, most of which had not survived.
I mean I bought a couple of them from antique
(14:54):
dealers that people had stuck in a drawer. Now, you
can't prove it from Jack the Ripper. You can prove
it's from back then and all that, But very similar.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
To the other ones.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
I think we'd be astonished at how many of them
he did write knowing secret the way I do.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Well, let's talk about sicicred because we really, I mean,
we've been talking about this for quite a while without
getting into your main suspect. Where do we start with
him to understand why you feel really strongly that this
should be the main suspect in Jack the Ripper?
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Where do we start with his life?
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Well, we start with him being born in Munich, Germany,
in eighteen sixty and by the age of three he
had his first surgery because he had a fistula. And
I read in three of his biographies that he'd had
this surgery starting he had three surgeries. The first two
failed and they never said what this fistula was. But
imagine at age of three in Munich, Germany, eighteen sixty three,
(15:47):
having surgery as a child, and then having a second one,
and then your fistula still isn't fixed. So the family
moves to London, where the mother had a sister or
something relative. They move into this house in London because
there's a surgeon there who's famous for fixing fistulas. It's
Sir Alfred duff Cooper who also surgically fixed Charles Dickens
(16:11):
fistula and Charles Dickens and his was in his rectum.
So I happened to track down Walter Secret's non biological nephew.
He had two non biological nephews that these guys who
were the sons of his third wife, Cheres Lesour, who
was an artist, a French artist who outlift him. And
now these two sons, I don't think they didn't never
(16:31):
know Walter Sicred because he died in nineteen forty two,
but they knew all about their famous uncle. And so
I went to visit this one nephew in his studio
in peckham Rae, John Lesore. I was talking to him
about his uncle and he was showing me he's a
painter too, and he was he got me to buy
a few of his paintings that are kind of influenced
by Walter Secrets, shall we say. But as I was
(16:52):
talking to him, he said, you know, you should write
my uncle's biography. And I thought oh, honey, you don't
even know what I'm getting ready to do. But trust me,
it's not gonna be a biographer you want. And I said,
let me ask you something. This is after I've bought
a painting table and an easel thing and several of
John's paintings and whatever. So I said, well, John, I said,
I keep reading about this fistula secret had. What was it?
(17:16):
And he says, oh, he said he had a hole
in his penis. I said, excuse me, He says yes.
I said, well, then, well I left very soon after that.
As soon as I got in the car, I immediately
wrote all this down because later Siicret's family denied this
was ever said, well, I promise you it was said,
so he had some problem with his genitals. Now, if
you have three surgeries on that by the time you're
(17:38):
five or six years old, can you imagine. We don't
even know if he got ether. We don't know what
that kid suffered. And it was an article not so
many years ago and a psychiatry magazine where a psychiatrist opined,
this was before my book, This is a psychiatrist opined
that the nature of Jack the Ripper's crimes the violence
(18:00):
struck him as somebody who might have suffered medical violence
as a child. Now, isn't that interesting because you think
of what he did to Catherine d Ouse, going open
her up and slashing a grabbit. There were many cases
like this. This is what the ripper. That's why they
called him the ripper. He didn't just cut your thirty RiPPs,
you open and then later, I believe, to begin dismembering people.
(18:20):
There are many stories and they're in my book about
torsos and limbs found in the Thames. Women who vanished,
including a music hall singer that he painted her portrait
and she insulted him, saying she'd use it as a
window screen, where she vanished after that and was never
heard of since.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Moving forward now, so we already have a young man
who's been it sounds like, tortured medically. How do we
then move ahead where we start to feel like Sickert
is someone who is developing a personality that is beyond
someone we should feel sorry for, and as someone who
has the potential to be a predator later in life.
(18:59):
Because regardless, it sounds like, regardless of whether or not
he is Jack the Ripper, it sounds like we are
moving toward someone who is deeply disturbed on several different levels.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
His own sister, who grew up to be a journalist
and was a very well respected person, but she had
tremendous physical disabilities. There was a partial document that I
found at Oxford University, her handwritten document, and she talks
about their childhoods, and she describes Walter as really being
a very cruel and unfeeling boy, and that he, you know,
(19:34):
that he would use his friends and then leave them
in tears, you know, because he didn't care about anybody.
The mother coddled him. In fact, she had a portrait
painted of him as a child. He's dressed with his
little curly locks, and he's in a velvet little dress.
And she used to refer to Walter and the boys. Now,
why would you refer to Walter and his brothers as
(19:56):
Walter and the boys? Unless it may be possible that
his gender might have been ambiguous at birth, that he
may have had a birth defect of his genitalia which
made it difficult to know what he was. It's interesting
sick Art is not known to have ever had children.
There is no account that's credible of ever really having
sex with anybody he was accused of adultery, but I've
(20:18):
yet to see any evidence that he had any I
suspect his wife, his first wife, Ellen, who was quote
an old maid age forty. When he started courting her,
he was twenty eight. We don't know that they ever
consummated their relationship. There's nothing that makes us think that
he may have been as active sexually as he wanted
people to believe. To get back to the story of
(20:39):
who he was when he was in his teens, his
big thing is he wanted to be an actor. So
he went to work for the Lyceum Theater with their
traveling actors, and he would go and interesting. A lot
of The Ripper letters are mailed from the very cities
that that acting troup used to go to. But he
was an actor, but he was a failed actor, and
he was said that he was best in the role
(21:01):
of an old man, and he was so good at
makeup and costumes that he quote roasted that he could
walk right past his own mother and she wouldn't recognize him.
Now that's a handy habit to have if you're Jack
the Ripper, isn't it. And he was always buying hand
me down clothes and costumes, and he would show up
dressed out landishly when you would go meet with people.
And he also would go to the Red Cross and
(21:22):
collect the uniforms of soldiers udyed And one of the
Ripper cases where a torso is found, the place where
it was found was notified by a man dressed as
a soldier who then vanished. There's all kinds of weird
things about people dressed as soldiers, including the very night
of the first Jack the Ripper murder, where two soldiers
were seen going off with the victim and it was
(21:44):
believed that a soldier did it. And ironically this soldier
was wearing a good conduct metal. Now that sounds exactly
like Secret's humor. To this day, I've wondered was that
really him dressed as a soldier. So he became the
actor that didn't work. And he he was also very artistic.
His father was an artist. Have you ever heard of
Punch and Judy. Well, his father was an artist for
(22:06):
Punch and Judy magazine and Germany, and I have seen
the drawings of the Punch and Judy stuff. Very violent,
by the way, really really violent. If you've ever looked
at Punch and Judy. It's a violent puppet act, hitting
people with sticks, hitting women with sticks and all this stuff.
And on some of the Jack the Ripper letters there
are little cartoon figures that look like Punch and Judy
(22:27):
hitting each other with sticks. It's just weird, and you go,
am I just imagining this? This is crazy. So he
was very talented by his DNA. He was drawing stuff
as a little kid. So he started going into art
and he became the apprentice to James McNeil Whistler. Well
Whistler magnificent artists. He's American born, which is interesting because
(22:49):
he and Sickret had a terrible adversarial relationship. I mean,
Whistler would not be easy to work with, but he
hated Whistler and was jealous of him, and it was
probably like the abuse father that he grew up with
that kind of father image. Well, interestingly enough, most of
the Ripper letters were the ones that are so famous,
begin with dear Boss. Well Boss was an American term.
(23:11):
Boss was not something that the British used back in
the eighteen eighties, and Whistler was American.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
He was born in Boston.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
In fact, his family was embroiled in the Civil War
back in the United States while he was in London,
you know, getting started as a big artist. So that's
when Secret became the artist. It was later on, It
wasn't right away, but he began to become very successful
and well known in later years. He actually gave art
lessons to Sir Winston Churchill. If you go to Blenham Palace,
(23:41):
you'll look at Churchill's artwork and it looks very, very
sickred esh. You know he learned this from his instructor.
I mean his artwork has been hanging in the royal palaces.
His shocking how he got around and people had no idea.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
What's your sense of his personality? I know that you
had said that he was described when he was a
child as being sort of unfeeling and distant.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
What was your sense as.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
He grew older. We know that he did not like Whistler.
It sounded like he could be a bit acerbic. Do
you have any details or any anecdotes of where we
just we get a real sense of what his personality
was like.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
I'll give you an example, something crude. He did the
Camden Town murder in nineteen oh seven. That was literally
in Camden Town where he had his art studio. He'd
had two art studios there at the time, and the victim,
Emily Dimmick, lived just around the corner and she was
basically entertaining all kinds of men when her husband would
go off. He was a chef on a train and
he would go away, you know, for nights on end,
(24:41):
and she'd have people over. So she was doing her
share of entertaining in this flat that they rented. Well,
the guy comes back from one of his train trips
in the doors locked, so he gets the landlady and
they have to go in and there she is in
bed with her throat cut. Well, the thing about it
is sicker. He would have people over for tea. And
when he was having people for over for tea wall
(25:02):
all this Camden Town murder stuff. There was a big trial.
They never caught the guy who did it. Secret what
you would call a lay figure, which was a mannequin
Back in the day. They'd look like a big wooden
puppet and you could sit it and use it to
help position a body and a drawing. These were very
crude and he had a very an old like seventeenth
eighteenth century lay figure and it looked like Pinocchio sort of,
(25:26):
and he would pretend he was murdering it and saying
it was the Camden Town murder. He would do this
to entertain his guests. It reminds you of the Preppy
murder when someone's shaking a rag doll and saying that
they're strangling the person. And that's what he would do,
outrageous things like that. Here's what's really creepy. He was
also a chef when there were body parts missing from
(25:46):
his victims.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Is there anything provable outside the Jack the Ripper murders?
Is there anything provable that he did that was violent?
I know that we've talked a little bit about speculation
people have gone missing, but was he ever arrested or
suspected of something outside of these cases totally under.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
The radar, not that we know of.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
But I'm not so sure because there's some very strange things.
For example, I went through you know, I went through
Whistler letters, James McNeill Whistler letters. We know that he
would have written around the time that this was all
going on, and very strangely he got summoned to Scotland Yard.
Whistler did and there was a letter he wrote to
someone where he was all in an uproar about he
(26:28):
was very upset about why he was having to go
to Scotland Yard. To this day we don't know what
they talked to him about. And the date on the letter,
I believe it's something like eighteen eighty seven or something,
or eighteen eighty six, which makes no sense if it
were about the Ripper because his crimes that we know
of didn't start till eighteen eighty eight. But I have
a feeling there were suspicions about him. Well, here's the
(26:51):
weird thing that happened. Whistler was supposed to go on
tour in America for his art stuff. Before he set
out on this tour, which I think he ended up
not doing, suddenly these same cities where he was supposed
to have an exhibit got letters claiming that Whistler was
Jack the Ripper. Now, who's even going to write something
like that? I mean, Whistler got so upset about all
(27:12):
of this, and that might be why he got dragged
into Scotland Yard. The date on the letter might be wrong,
but there.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
Are weird things.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
And why did John Grieve know about this? Now? I
know that there had been a book written some years
earlier that suggested Walter Sickert as Jack the Ripper. And
this was written by a woman whose mother was a
friend of one of Sickret's friends, another artist. And this
woman who I met with before she died, the one
who wrote the book about him. The tale that she
(27:39):
tells about her mother being in France and coming home
and having met up with this artist who was Sickret's friend,
and this horrible story about that he was painting murder pictures,
and there was a fear that he was actually one
doing these awful things. I mean, there's been rumors he
painted a picture, a portrait in nineteen oh seven when
a man he's looking out a shuttered window in this
(27:59):
bedroom and it's called Jack the Ripper's bedroom. He was
obsessed with Jack the Ripper, and he used to tell
tales about it. He used to say that at one
time he lived in a rooming house with Jack the Ripper.
These people have to talk about it. Their fantasies are overwhelming.
I mean, it'd be one thing if Siicret never mentioned it,
knew nothing about the case. But he's so in the
middle of it, and by his own virtue, which I
(28:21):
think in and of itself is very odd.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
What does his nephew say about your books or any
of this. Does he cooperate anything, does he agree with anything? Well,
I don't know what he says today.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
I don't even know if his nephews are still alive
because they were elderly then. And this was two thousand
and one when I met with him. No, he wrote
me a letter after I'd been to his place, when
he realized what I was doing, and he accused me
of being undercover and what I'd done was wrong, and
that told people that the fistula thing he never said that. Well,
that's a lie. I swear on my own life that
(28:55):
he said that. And I could show you the entry
in my journal that I wrote the minute in the car.
I guarantee you his family covered for him in his dotage,
No telling what he said. He used to get drunk
on champagne and stuff, and I go lock him in
the bedroom because no telling what he started rambling about.
I know he stalked people, that's for sure. He stoked
the actress Ellen Terry, who was kind of like the
(29:16):
Angelina Jolie of the day. One of the most beautiful
actresses of the day. He stalked her, and then he
stoked another woman many years later, where he'd written these
letters to this actress in Paris and he would leave
them at the stage door with no postage on it.
I mean, he definitely stalked people, but he was talented,
and he was charming, and he was part of the
(29:36):
upper class society, and he was protected by them, if
you ask.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Me, he still is. Now.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
There's I think an argument that he was not in town.
Was he not in France? Tell me more about that.
So the argument was that he was out of town
during some of these murders.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yes, he was in France most of the time, but
he was in and out of London. And how do
I know that. It's because when he his big thing
was to go to the music halls, which were filled
with sex workers.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
By the way.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
They would start late at evening and let out early,
like at midnight or early in the morning, always letting
out not long before the next ripper crime happened. So
he would go to these music halls and he would
draw what he saw on these little postcard size as
pieces of paper that he kept in his pocket with
a pencil. Well he dated those and there are several
(30:26):
I found that are dated in London at a certain
music hall within twenty four hours of a Ripper crime.
It was no big deal to take the steamer across
the English Channel. You could do it in one day,
and I think that's what he did after he committed
his crimes. He would go chill out somewhere, probably go
to the near steamer go and then go to his
family house in DP and that's where he did. His
most beautiful artwork was in France and dep But when
(30:49):
you get back to London, I think it brought out
the beast in him. And by the way, speaking of that,
it's not a coincidence that the Ripper crime started the
very time the Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde open at
the Lyceum Theater where Siccret used to work. The stage
manager was Bram Stoker, who wrote Dracula and Secret knew
all these people. Imagine that Jack the Ripper gave Winston
(31:09):
Churchill painting lessons.
Speaker 4 (31:10):
I mean, seriously, do you think any pushback that your
theory gets is because maybe you're an American who is
investigating the most famous case, not only in the world
but especially in the United Kingdom.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Well, I don't think that help matters. I don't think
it helped matters. I don't think it helped matters that
I was one of the top crime novelists in the
world at the time, that I did all that, and
flying around on private jets and driving ferraris and all
the rest of it. I don't blame people for thinking
what they did. Why take me seriously? I don't know
that I would have taken me seriously. I've been very
fortunate with my success and stuff, but at the heart
(31:48):
of things, I'm still that little reporter running around chasing
down a story and go find out everything I can.
And I don't summarily or casually accuse somebody a murder,
even if they've been dead for a long time. That's wrong.
And I still am accusing him. If I am ever
shown that he absolutely didn't do it, I would be
the first to take it all back and say, well,
(32:09):
I know he wrote some of the letters. Okay, I
know he did, and he admits he was obsessed with
the case, but it looks like he just piggybacked on
what someone else did. But I don't believe that. I
wish for his sake it were true. You know this
may sound weird to say, I find this all very sad.
This was a really supremely gifted person and I'm sorry
whatever happened to him as a child. And I know
(32:30):
his father was very cruel. When he would go out
on a stroll with the disabled sister, he would deliberately
walk her into walls and into hedges, and sicret learned, well,
he had a good role.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Model for all that.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
You have some pretty incredible stories about Sickert, who I
had never heard of before, and not in the context
of Jack the Ripper. How were you able to get
like the story about the father intentionally running the daughter
into a wall.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Where does that come from?
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Some of that came from the document that his sister wrote,
but most of the telling things about Walter Sickert come
from the memoirs written by his artist friends, who had
no idea what they were revealing. A good example, he
was with this one artist friend one night and he said, oh,
let's go for a walk in the fog. It's a
(33:18):
very rim brand. So he picks up this gladstone bag,
you know those things that look like a big old
black doctor's bag, and weirdly. It's got a weird address,
something painted on it about a hedge or something strange.
And they go out into the fog and he says
he was taking her on a walk to show her
Jack the Ripper's world. They were going on a Jack
(33:38):
the Ripper walk. This is what he did, and she
was actually frightened. And there are other people that had
encounters with him that they reported as being very strange.
He wrote to a friend one time, at least you feel,
because he couldn't feel, couldn't feel anything. And I think
one of the reasons he did this stuff was to
feel something. And that's typical of a psychopath. They don't feel,
(34:01):
they don't feel remorse, they don't feel loved, they don't
feel attachments to people, and it must be a lonely,
miserable existence. And at one point, when he was in
a deep depression, living in France and writing, he wrote
a lot of letters. And I went through every letter
of his I could find, and there are a lot
of them. So I learned a lot from his letters
to by the way, and I had to have a
lot of them transcribed because his handwriting is so awful.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
I couldn't read him.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
But he wrote about listening to the water dripping into
a pot from the leaky roof in this place as
Hove as he was staying, and he wrote to his friend,
I am the most hunted man in England right now.
Now what does that mean? Very strange. So all of
this stuff, memoirs, Whistler's own memoirs, Whistler's letters, sick Art's letters, Oh,
(34:44):
his wife's letters, you know. I went to that archival
source Ellen Cobden, And what's very fascinating is when you
get to eighteen eighty eight, there's not a single letter
between him and her, even though they were separated much
at the time. She was traveling and he was alone
in London some of the time in the fall of
eighteen eighty eight, when he supposedly was in France all
(35:05):
the time, Oh no, he wasn't. But all of these
things they continue to add up to a composite of
something that's so far from normal. This guy was so
obsessed with all this there was no way you'd ever
keep up with it. And I believe that he's responsible
for a lot of the ripper Lord that's out there today.
I believe he might be the one who started the
Royal conspiracy based on story Secret himself told about a
(35:29):
sex worker who was across the street from a studio
in a tobacco shop, and that Prince Eddie went in
there and had an illegitimate child with her that they
then gave the scret to raise as his own. That's
for him, you know, And that's kind of a little
bit the kernel of what went on in the Royal conspiracy.
You know, Prince Eddie has been blamed, but there's no
evidence whatsoever that anybody connected to the royal family had
(35:53):
anything to do with this. And I think it's a
bunch of hooey.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
And you think he is responsible for more than just
the canonical five, more than the additional two. You think
there are many more victims. And when did it stop?
Why would it stop? What you think he's responsible for.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
The canonical five is a bunch of malarkey, because it
was that term was invented or coined by the former
Commissioner of the London City Police, who wasn't even present
for the Ripper crimes. I have in my possession the
original Times newspapers from eighteen eighty eight. I have every
single one of them. They're in books, this big bound
in leather at one on the table right over there.
(36:30):
You can't see it. And I went through all the
original newspaper stories. In the early days of the investigation,
they referred to seven murders so far seven, then it
became five because of the memoir this constable wrote many
years later. First of all, they didn't understand that with
sexual psychopaths, they don't always do everything exactly the same
(36:51):
way things progress. They start out as you cut someone's throat,
then you open them up, then you take their introls
out and throw them on the pavement. Then you get
to Mary Kelly, where you flay her to the bone,
and you steal every organ except her brain. Oh well,
excuse me, you remove every organ except her brain. And
he did steal her heart. He took her heart, but
her other organs were very irreverently placed under her head.
(37:15):
You know, he just probably spent hours with that particular body.
So anybody I showed a picture of Mary Kelly, we
have a couple of crime scenes pictures of her. The
only in existence are the ones of Mary Kelly because
someone showed up with one of those old wooden box cameras.
And I have an original photograph. I should have pulled
it out and shown it to you of her body
on the bed and her whole face is gone or
(37:38):
she's been flayed. You can see the black line around
her lower leg where he's getting ready to amputate that
below the knee, because he's cut an incision there, removed
her whole face, cut off her breast, took out her organs,
and you go, how is it a far reach to
think that someone who would do that might not be
dismembering people, and that you're why are you not thinking
that this guy is the one who's leaving Torso scattered out.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
So the ripper, the kind of conventional ripper timeline ends
in eighteen ninety two, is that right?
Speaker 3 (38:07):
I don't know when he ended.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
I mean that the Camden Town murder was nineteen oh seven,
but you know how long he may have killed after that,
I don't know, but it probably began to dissipate the
older you get. And you probably can see that in
his art workers after his Camden Town paintings. They're the
ones that made him famous, the Camden Town series of
paintings that all show women who look dead, they look murdered,
(38:31):
all sprawled on a bed. These nudes, they do not
look like art. They look like violent pornography if you
ask me. But that would show that imagination was still
being very much fueled, you know, if you want to
think of it in extremists. One goes out to do
research to get inspiration for a story, I go to
the morgue, but I don't cause the bodies to show
(38:52):
up there. That's the difference. But this is how I
think he got his artistic inspiration was through the violence
that he perpetrated, and I think at some point he quit.
Now it is interesting that one of the other things
that's creepy he'd moved to France for a while. He
was in and out of France all the time, and
he bought a former police department there as his home.
It had bedrooms that had been former jail cells, and
(39:13):
that's where he lived when his second wife died. She
also had physical problems. He was feeble and had money,
and he was such a disgusting person that when she
died there are letters at the Tate to him writing
her relatives constantly asking for money for her headstone and
all the rest. He didn't bother having her headstone engraved.
(39:34):
I'm pretty sure he poisoned her with morphine. He decided
it was time for her to go because she did
you know, he was in charge of giving her morphine.
And he had met Cherise Lasour and as soon as
as this one was dead, Cherise Lsur took him under
her wing. And that was his third wife and she
supported him too.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
He died in nineteen forty two. Can we just talk
about the end of his life and what you know
about it and sort of how to wrap up him
and him as a care character. We know how everything
has gone up until then. What do we think about
the last decade of his life?
Speaker 2 (40:06):
He got more and more peculiar. You know, he didn't
drink in his early years, and then he started drinking.
This one actress that he was stalking in France, who
I mean these women, they actually would even go on
a carriage ride with him. They didn't realize what was
going on here. I mean, Ellen Terry would have secret
help her run errands. Meanwhile he's walking past her house
(40:26):
at night, staring through the windows, you know. And this
Gwen frank Jan Davies, the French actress, I think she
went on a carriage ride and had lunch with him
once and he had downed two bottles of champagne, And
so I imagine that his wife, his third wife, get
him tucked into his bedroom and hush him up. So
he didn't tell wild stories. So he was known for that.
But he was very much respected until I think close
(40:50):
to the end of his days. I think he was
rather much getting becoming forgotten. But he had an honorary
PhD from the University of Manchester. He taught art, he
wrote about art. I think in his very late days
he had a lot of health problems. He was he
supposedly his cause of death, for one thing, was like
constant kidney infections and urinary tract infections and all of
this was probably the sequela to his early surgeries and
(41:12):
having a lot of scar tissue and strictures and things
the damage that would have been caused by that, and
that's what he died of. But he wasn't young. He
was almost eighty two. That's what's so weird. You realize
that he lived to see the first movies about Jack
the Ripper, this one behind Me, the Lodger, And by
the way that Lodger was based on the story by
(41:32):
the author who sat next to a man at a
dinner who claimed he had lived in the same rooming
house with Jack the Ripper. Well, who do you think
that might have been that night? It was probably sicker
And that became the basis of her book The Lodger
that then became the first movie.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
This guy, he.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
Was, this publicity junkie. He had, He had his own
clipping service. I went through all that too, all the microfilm.
I had all of it printed, including stuff that went
back to his childhood that was written in some form
of German that I had to have somebody translated into
bottom Jar and then have translated into English. And that's
where I learned stories about his father, who was very
similar to Secred, who was always wandering around, would disappear
(42:08):
for days on end. Siicred would take his wife Ellen
out for her birthday. He'd get up to go use
the bathroom or do something and never come back to
the table. She never knew where he was. He would
disappear for days on end. It wasn't until the last
year of her life that she finally wrote him off
and stopped dealing with him. This was about nineteen fourteen,
I believe, and she changed her will the last year
(42:32):
of her life to include that she would have an
autopsy on death. Now why would she do that. I
think she was afraid she was going to be murdered
by him. I think he poisoned people too, just so
you know, because right after he got with Ellen in
eighteen eighty seven, his own father suddenly died of some
neurological flare up, something that had to do with his brain,
(42:52):
and he died. And then not long after that, Ellen's
younger sister, who was only in her twenties, she came
down with some weird neural logical something fever and all
the rest, and she died. Well, just so you know,
the painting studios used a lot of things that were poisonous,
like Oarsnick there were poisons glore back in those days.
We don't know, but he would have loved the power
(43:15):
of watching someone getting sicker every day because of something
he's given them in their tea or their food, or
who knows what. And I think that Ellen, I mean,
why would you want an autopsy? She's a proper upper
class lady who wants an autopsy? In nineteen friggin fourteen,
and he had himself cremated when he died. Not many
people did that either.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
So I would say, of all the theories that I've heard,
yours is more valid, if not certainly as valid as
the ones that have been thrown out there to wrap
up Jack the Ripper. Though, what will it take do
you think to finally, definitively solve this case for everyone?
Is it coming up with DNA real DNA from one
(43:56):
of the crime scenes and you can compare it to
sickard and that's or do you think I think we're
done right?
Speaker 3 (44:01):
There's nothing to be done.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
You could dig up his remains, his creamines, and now
DNA testing is sensitive enough that you might be lucky
and get his DNA profile, But good luck getting permission
to exhume him or any of his victims that's been
in discussions before. You'd have to get the government to
approve that, and you'd have to have really good justification
for it. Even so, I don't The only thing you
(44:24):
could ever prove is that he wrote the letters. You're
not going to find his DNA on somebody that's been
in the ground for one hundred and thirty years after
it's been in the dead house. They threw the clothes
out in the alleyway. We don't have any of the
clothing of the victims. They didn't save things like that
back then. In fact, the ragpickers they would come around
and collect rags like the clothing thrown in an alleyway.
They would sell it to paper mills. Imagine this. They
(44:48):
would bleach it and they would take the paper and
the linens and stuff the cotton, whatever, and they would
turn it into fine stationary, the very fine stationary. That
secret was writing his ripper letters one on. Some of
it came from clothing of poppers, and that's something the
chain of life, the chain of death.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
Are you as enthusiastic about your fiction books as you
are about this book, because if you are even more
enthusiastic about the fiction series, I can't even imagine what
you're like on a book tour, because you are just
it's like you're bleeding this. You really believe it, and
you have done a tremendous amount of research.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
You know, if anybody listened to the evidence I look at,
if you look at the evidence that I have, and
I have to be quick to tell people I didn't
analyze this stuff. I didn't do the DNA testing, and
the DNA that we did get is inclusive. We don't
have secrets DNA, but we got a profile from a
ripper letter that had never been laminated or treated by
(45:46):
the conservationist, and so it gave us some good DNA.
That most of the stuff had been destroyed. You're not
going to get anything off of it because they would
take the letter in the envelope and they would put
a laminated piece of plastic over it. Can you imagine
like you do heating a decal for a T shirt?
So what do you expect is going to be left.
You're ruining the handwriting, you're ruining the DNA, You're ruining everything.
(46:09):
They never should have done that. I'm sorry, but they
shouldn't have. But we don't know whose DNA any of
that is when you're getting it off an envelope, because
remember back in those days, a lot of people sealed
envelopes with a sponge. You might find Whistler's DNA on
a letter that Sickert sealed in his studio. So no,
I'm not going to prove it through that probably and
nobody else is either, I don't think Unless I tell
(46:31):
you what would be really telling, there is a ripper
letter that has I mentioned it a woodprint on it,
this face, and he says, this is Jack the Ripper.
Ain't I a handsome guy? Or something like that? People
thought it was a drawing. Tell I took an art
historian to look at it in the public record office,
and she looked at the original and she said, this
isn't a drawing. She said, this is a woodcut. And
(46:52):
she said this is a good enough woodcut to hang
in a fricking gallery. You know that you could carve
this face on a piece of wood like an etching,
put it an InCor put it on the letter. Well, now, oh,
wouldn't it be a nice thing if it turned out
that and Sicret's memorabilia that he left behind with his
family there happened to be that woodcut in a gladstone bag.
(47:14):
Then the one he carried everywhere. Now that's never turned up,
and if it did, I suspect certain parties would not
come clean about it. But even that could be argued,
where did he get it? And just because he sent
a letter doesn't mean he killed anybody, right, So I
think what I would simply suggest is that if people
should look at the evidence, read it in my book,
everything I say is true. If there's a if it's not,
(47:35):
it's just an honest mistake, like a street sign that
I get the name wrong or something. But the science
in it is actually just the truth. I mean. Peter
Bauer is the one that did the paper analysis, and
the Tait hired him to show what an idiot I was.
They were going to show that he was going to
look at the paper and show that this didn't match
anything they had to do with sicret Instead, he was
the one who proved it did, proved it did, and
(47:57):
even called me one time. He says, oh my god,
this one watermark. It was at the Getty in California,
and he said, this is the best one I've seen.
He said, I need to look at this in person.
So he flew all the way to LA and looked
at it in person. And that's the one that was
like six pieces of paper out of twenty four, and
three of them were ripper letters and the other three
were secret letters. And I show you the pictures of
(48:19):
those in my book. There's something going on there, and
maybe I don't have it dead right. No pun intended
about what he actually did, But I'm telling you he's
connected to all this, and I do think he did it.
I think that you don't confess the way these Ripper letters.
They're violent, they're awful, they're crude, they hate women, they
hate the authority.
Speaker 3 (48:38):
His father hated authority.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
He would write about the police and how much he
hated him in his German letters and stuff. But I'm
never going to prove it any more than anybody else
probably will, and I don't really care. I mean, it's
not about being right. I don't care anymore whether people
think I'm right. I hope that people think I did
a credible job, because most of all, I would want
to have integrity and be ethical. Would never say something
(49:01):
that I believe isn't true. And like I said it,
the day comes that we find out that he absolutely
couldn't have done it for some reason, I'd be the
first to want to know all about it, because it's
not about me, it's about truth.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(49:47):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer, artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hartstark, Kilgaiff and Danielle Kramer.
Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold more Wicked and
on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I did not ask to write about Jack the Ripper.
I got ambushed by him, and I'm still mad at
him because I had a perfectly reasonable, sensible, nice little
life until he came along.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:53):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. Our next guest is a legend.
It's novelist Patricia Cornwell. She's one of my mother's most
(01:14):
favorite authors, and she's also a nonfiction writer and several
years ago she wrote a book about Jack the Ripper
called Portrait of a Killer. Jack the Ripper case closed.
This book is Patricia's opinion on his identity. Based on
her extensive research, Patricia believes that Jack the Ripper was
a German British artist named Walter Sickert. This is a
(01:36):
controversial opinion according to some ripperlogists. And you'll hear why again.
This is Patricia's theory. And I'm not a ripperlogist, but
I loved our conversation. Let's get started on how you
came to this story. For me, personally, I don't want
to know who it is. I don't want to know,
(01:57):
and there's so many theories out there, but you clearly
wanted to know who this was because you have done
such a tremendous amount of research.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
The fact of the matter is I was in London
in the spring of two thousand and one. I was
actually there with the Governor of Virginia and his wife
to promote the archaeological excavation of Jamestown. And while I
was there, I got an invitation to tour Scotland Yard
and that their premier investigator wanted to chat with me,
(02:25):
and he was their in house expert on Jack the Ripper,
and I thought, I'm not interested in that. I'm here
doing something else, and I'm writing Scarpetta, and I thought
it would be absolutely disrespectful for me not to go
and accept that invitation. It's an honor. So I went
over there and the investigator's name was John Greeve, and
he was towards getting ready to retire. But he started
(02:48):
telling me all about Jack the Ripper, and I'm like, okay,
but I don't know what this has got to do
with me. But I was listening, and then he said,
you know, tomorrow, I'd like to take you to Whitechapel
and I'll drive you around and i'll show you what's
left of where these crimes occurred, the ones that we
know of. Some people say they were five. Really at
(03:09):
the time it was there was at least seven in
based on other things, I know that the Ripper didn't
stop killing in the late fall of eighteen eighty eight.
He absolutely didn't. But I went on this tour with
John Grief in the rain and the cold. It was
a miserable day. I was supposed to be in Ireland,
and I canceled my trip to go do this with
him because I just thought I have to go. At
(03:31):
the end of it, I said to him, who are
the suspects, and he started rattling off some names and
I said, based on what he said, based on nothing theories.
And I said, well, what about the evidence. He said, well,
the only evidence left because nothing was really kept at
the time anyway, the only evidence would be the letters
that Jack the Ripper wrote to the police and other people.
(03:52):
And I said, what letters. I've never heard of that before.
So apparently quite a lot of them, he said, And listen,
he said, if you're going to look into this, he said,
there's this painter named Walter Sickert and his name I've
been hearing his name for a really long time. And
he painted these murder paintings and he said, and I'm
just telling you you need to look into him. So
that came from Scotland Yard. It wasn't my idea. And furthermore,
(04:14):
John Greeve, I was like a PhD student going and
sitting down with my advisor, you know. Every now and
then I'd show up and we'd go meet at some
Indian restaurant in Whitechapel and I'd pull out my big
portfolio like an artist keeps, and I'd let him go
through my latest stuff that I was gathering from the investigation,
and he was sort of the wizard behind the curtain
(04:34):
the entire time I was doing that first book, I
got to see a lot of things and do a
lot of things your average person wouldn't get to do.
But what convinced me that Walter Sickret was Jack the Ripper.
It wasn't just the art work. I mean, the artwork
was enough to give you the willies. It's like, wow,
this is weird, and his biography's strange stuff. But when
I went to see the actual letters, the real ones
(04:56):
in person, and you put them on a light box,
and then later you bring in experts and scientists and
what have you, and it was very obvious that there
were connections between Walter Sicicred's letters and Jack the Ripper's letters.
There were matching watermarks. There were the six letters out
of a total of only twenty four pieces of paper
that were handmlled with this particular water mark, and five
(05:18):
of them were two from Jack the Ripper and three
were Walter Siicard and they were written on his mother's stationary.
How's that for creepy. He cut the letter head off,
but the water mark and the paper measurements and I
had the world's foremost paper expert who was doing all this.
There's no question he wrote some of the letters, so
he would have a lot to answer for it today,
one way or other.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Will you take me through before we talk more about
Walter Sicard and you know your evidence behind all of this.
Take me through the prevalent theories I've heard, Royal family,
I have heard, you know, I mean, just it feels
like it runs the gamut. What's your understanding of the
most popular theories that have pervaded did everything for the
(06:01):
past almost one hundred and fifty years.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Well, the most popular was always the royal conspiracy, you know,
where Prince Eddie, for example, had an affair with maybe
one of the sex workers who ended up being murdered.
And interestingly enough, Walter Sickert actually has overtones or they
are echoes of him that are mixed in with this
whole royal theory because of stuff that he used to
tell people. But we'll get to that later. But the
(06:25):
point is the Royal conspiracy. It was the Queen's surgeon
was doing it. Sir William Gull was running around and
butchering these people. And by the way, he was Queen
victorious physician at that time, and he was also i think,
like in his seventies and he had stuffered a stroke.
Another theory then, of course, a prominent theory was it
(06:45):
was some insane, illuctric person who lived in the slums.
And then you get this guy named Kozminski, who DNA
supposedly later connected to a shawl that Catherine Edow's one
of the victims. She was murdered in Miter Square on
the night of the double murder in November of eighteen
eighty eight, and so the theory was suddenly this shawl
(07:07):
appears over one hundred years later, and it's claimed that
this was found at the crime scene, it was given
to a cop, it was stored in various places, and
then testing was done to see if Kominski's or somebody's
DNA was on it, and magically it was. But I'm
going to tell you right now, uh huh, No way
I know the history of that shawl. First of all,
(07:28):
I've seen the police drawing of Catherine Edel's crime scene,
and there's no big shawl like that. There's nothing in
the drawing. There's no mention in the original police reports
about a shawl that actually looks more like a tablecloth runner.
And furthermore, for a while it was stored at the
Crime Museum at Scotland Yard because it was donated there
(07:48):
and people who work there it was always being passed
around the room. They I mean, one of the persons
I know cut a piece of it out and had
it on his desk the lab that did the DNA testing.
From what I understand, I'm just going to put it
this because I don't want to get sued by anybody,
But that is not the sort of science that I'm
used to hearing being practiced. And I do not believe
in that DNA for one minute. And are you going
(08:09):
to explain to me how someone like that wrote the
letters that we've seen, because what that would tell you
is that someone like Walter Siicred or basically we know
I do know that Walter Sicred wrote at least some
of those letters. And if you look at them, you
see the hand of an artist. One of them is
a print from a wood block, you know, a face
carved in wood that's stamped in ink, that's professional looking.
(08:30):
There are so many things that point to Sicred and
the only explanation if it were some quote crazy person
like Kosminski would be if somebody like that killed these
people and then it was turned into a carnival by
some crazy person like Walter Siicard, I don't find that
very believable. For one thing, Walter Sicicred painted a painting
called Red Jack the Ripper's Bedroom, and it's the very
(08:52):
bedroom he was living in at the time when he
painted it, which is also when the Camden Town murder
happened right around the corner from another woman who with
a throat cut. This was in nineteen oh seven. So
the theories are things like that, no, it's not what
it was. It was a psychopathic killer. But not all
of them are ignorant and without resources.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
What about the argument that many of these letters have
been I guess proven. I didn't know this proven to
be hoaxes, and I know you you just sort of
addressed that that it seems ridiculous to you that Walter
Sickert has contributed to the letters that would have been
hoaxes rather than being an authentic Jack the Ripper letter.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Listen.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
I have been through every one of those letters, not
only at the National Archives but also the City of
London Archives. Because you see Katherine Edows, this person we're
just talking about who was Basically, she was disemboweled on
the sidewalk in the dark shadows of Miterer Square, where
sex workers, you know, would sometimes meet the gentlemen coming
(09:52):
out of the clubs late at night. And that's where
Katherine Edows were. She'd just gotten out of jail for
being drunk. She was so drunk she couldn't walk. And
when the constable finally led her out of the jail
after midnight for some reason, instead of heading home she
didn't really have a home, but heading back to where
she had been before, she went into Miter Square. And
(10:13):
next thing, you know, I mean, a watchman goes by
on his rounds. You could just hear the heels of
his shoes on the cobblestones, and by the time he
comes back around, like fifteen minutes later, she's there. That's
how quickly this guy struck. He cut her throat, then
he cut her all the way down through the pubic area.
He took her kidneys, or at least one of them.
(10:35):
Some organs were grabbed, her intestines and everything were dumped
out on the sidewalk. And then this whole notion that
it was a surgical thing, is blooney. There's nothing surgical
about any Objack the Ripper's incisions. There's what I call
slash and grab. The biggest thing is he probably I
believe he came around from behind them and then they
go down on the pavement and then he'd come around
the other thing and start tearing off their clothes, ripping off,
(10:56):
cutting through the clothes. These were sexual crimes, even though
there's no evidence that he had any sexual contact with
these people. His gratification came from the violence.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
One thing that's interesting is I have another show called
Buried Bones with a forensic investigator named Paul Holes, and
we've talked about that the theory, not necessarily with Jack
the Ripper, but the theory that if a victim has
been dismembered in a certain way, cut in a certain way,
that it has to be someone with medical education. And
he said, hunters know how to break down animals better
(11:27):
than just about anyone butcher's And he said even lay
people can figure it out. So I am happy to
know that that has been refuted I think by anybody
who's credible that's looked into this case. Why do you
think this case in particular for taking a pause here.
Why do you think this case in particular has been
(11:47):
something that has sparked so much controversy over this amount
of time.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
I mean, I imagine that you've had.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
People privately or publicly criticize what you're saying, because I
think everybody, anybody who's an expert in Jack the Ripper,
or when they put out something it's refuted. Do you
feel like it's understandable based on what you know about
how people are so enthusiastic about this case.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
You know what the problem with it is. Everybody thinks
they know about it, and so they're not willing to
learn anything new.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Almost.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
I would guarantee that the vast preponderance of those people
who have criticized me for my books on Jack the
Ripper never read either one of them ever, especially the
more recent one, which is not for the feinne of Heart.
It's very graphic, and it's a big book, and I
show you the evidence, you know, hundreds and hundreds of
images to let you see what it looks like, even
(12:38):
photographs of murdered victims. But I agree with you what
you said in the very beginning. People don't really want
this solved. It's kind of like the Titanic's more interesting
if it's still on the bottom of the ocean. If
you really raise the whole thing and put it in
the middle of a hangar for everybody to look at,
it would seem so mundane and it would not be
have the intrigue and the mystery Amelia air Heart. If
(13:00):
we finally find her, it won't be the same as
not finding her. It becomes this looming question of who
did this horrible thing? And when you go to the
graves of Jack the Ripper's victims, and where else do
you see on the tombstone victim of Jack the Ripper?
Two of those graves are like that at least, I mean,
(13:21):
where do you see that that? Yeah, victim of Ted Bundy.
We don't do that. That's how pervasive this was back then.
It's all because the Ripper wrote letters. He taunted the police,
he played games with them. I find myself going through
the Ripper letters and laughing out loud at times, knowing
I shouldn't because of his humor. Like there's one an
(13:43):
envelope that he tacked to a tree in a place
called bird Cage Lane in London. Tacked it to a tree,
a Ripper letter, and he drew a stamp on it
with a bird, a cartoon bird. I mean I almost
burst out laughing out loud in the public record office.
I said, is nobody notice this kind of stuff?
Speaker 3 (14:01):
He'll have a.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Little pair of scissors of where you cut along the
line like doctor Seuss does. And It's like, who is
not noticing these things?
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Now?
Speaker 2 (14:10):
I'm not saying all the Ripper letters are genuine, absolutely not.
In fact, there's only a couple hundred left that we
know of, so imagine how many there must have been
back in the day, and not only original ones, but
fake ones, hoax ones. Walter Sickert suffered from what you
probably heard of called graphamania. He was a compulsive writer
as a person. He was in fact, he used to
(14:32):
apologize to people for sending yet another letter or writing
yet another editorial for a newspaper. He couldn't stop. He
was always writing, always painting. And I believe that the
Ripper I. E. Siicert, probably wrote hundreds and hundreds, possibly
thousands of these communications, most of which had not survived.
I mean I bought a couple of them from antique
(14:54):
dealers that people had stuck in a drawer. Now, you
can't prove it from Jack the Ripper. You can prove
it's from back then and all that, But very similar.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
To the other ones.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
I think we'd be astonished at how many of them
he did write knowing secret the way I do.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Well, let's talk about sicicred because we really, I mean,
we've been talking about this for quite a while without
getting into your main suspect. Where do we start with
him to understand why you feel really strongly that this
should be the main suspect in Jack the Ripper?
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Where do we start with his life?
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Well, we start with him being born in Munich, Germany,
in eighteen sixty and by the age of three he
had his first surgery because he had a fistula. And
I read in three of his biographies that he'd had
this surgery starting he had three surgeries. The first two
failed and they never said what this fistula was. But
imagine at age of three in Munich, Germany, eighteen sixty three,
(15:47):
having surgery as a child, and then having a second one,
and then your fistula still isn't fixed. So the family
moves to London, where the mother had a sister or
something relative. They move into this house in London because
there's a surgeon there who's famous for fixing fistulas. It's
Sir Alfred duff Cooper who also surgically fixed Charles Dickens
(16:11):
fistula and Charles Dickens and his was in his rectum.
So I happened to track down Walter Secret's non biological nephew.
He had two non biological nephews that these guys who
were the sons of his third wife, Cheres Lesour, who
was an artist, a French artist who outlift him. And
now these two sons, I don't think they didn't never
(16:31):
know Walter Sicred because he died in nineteen forty two,
but they knew all about their famous uncle. And so
I went to visit this one nephew in his studio
in peckham Rae, John Lesore. I was talking to him
about his uncle and he was showing me he's a
painter too, and he was he got me to buy
a few of his paintings that are kind of influenced
by Walter Secrets, shall we say. But as I was
(16:52):
talking to him, he said, you know, you should write
my uncle's biography. And I thought oh, honey, you don't
even know what I'm getting ready to do. But trust me,
it's not gonna be a biographer you want. And I said,
let me ask you something. This is after I've bought
a painting table and an easel thing and several of
John's paintings and whatever. So I said, well, John, I said,
I keep reading about this fistula secret had. What was it?
(17:16):
And he says, oh, he said he had a hole
in his penis. I said, excuse me, He says yes.
I said, well, then, well I left very soon after that.
As soon as I got in the car, I immediately
wrote all this down because later Siicret's family denied this
was ever said, well, I promise you it was said,
so he had some problem with his genitals. Now, if
you have three surgeries on that by the time you're
(17:38):
five or six years old, can you imagine. We don't
even know if he got ether. We don't know what
that kid suffered. And it was an article not so
many years ago and a psychiatry magazine where a psychiatrist opined,
this was before my book, This is a psychiatrist opined
that the nature of Jack the Ripper's crimes the violence
(18:00):
struck him as somebody who might have suffered medical violence
as a child. Now, isn't that interesting because you think
of what he did to Catherine d Ouse, going open
her up and slashing a grabbit. There were many cases
like this. This is what the ripper. That's why they
called him the ripper. He didn't just cut your thirty RiPPs,
you open and then later, I believe, to begin dismembering people.
(18:20):
There are many stories and they're in my book about
torsos and limbs found in the Thames. Women who vanished,
including a music hall singer that he painted her portrait
and she insulted him, saying she'd use it as a
window screen, where she vanished after that and was never
heard of since.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Moving forward now, so we already have a young man
who's been it sounds like, tortured medically. How do we
then move ahead where we start to feel like Sickert
is someone who is developing a personality that is beyond
someone we should feel sorry for, and as someone who
has the potential to be a predator later in life.
(18:59):
Because regardless, it sounds like, regardless of whether or not
he is Jack the Ripper, it sounds like we are
moving toward someone who is deeply disturbed on several different levels.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
His own sister, who grew up to be a journalist
and was a very well respected person, but she had
tremendous physical disabilities. There was a partial document that I
found at Oxford University, her handwritten document, and she talks
about their childhoods, and she describes Walter as really being
a very cruel and unfeeling boy, and that he, you know,
(19:34):
that he would use his friends and then leave them
in tears, you know, because he didn't care about anybody.
The mother coddled him. In fact, she had a portrait
painted of him as a child. He's dressed with his
little curly locks, and he's in a velvet little dress.
And she used to refer to Walter and the boys. Now,
why would you refer to Walter and his brothers as
(19:56):
Walter and the boys? Unless it may be possible that
his gender might have been ambiguous at birth, that he
may have had a birth defect of his genitalia which
made it difficult to know what he was. It's interesting
sick Art is not known to have ever had children.
There is no account that's credible of ever really having
sex with anybody he was accused of adultery, but I've
(20:18):
yet to see any evidence that he had any I
suspect his wife, his first wife, Ellen, who was quote
an old maid age forty. When he started courting her,
he was twenty eight. We don't know that they ever
consummated their relationship. There's nothing that makes us think that
he may have been as active sexually as he wanted
people to believe. To get back to the story of
(20:39):
who he was when he was in his teens, his
big thing is he wanted to be an actor. So
he went to work for the Lyceum Theater with their
traveling actors, and he would go and interesting. A lot
of The Ripper letters are mailed from the very cities
that that acting troup used to go to. But he
was an actor, but he was a failed actor, and
he was said that he was best in the role
(21:01):
of an old man, and he was so good at
makeup and costumes that he quote roasted that he could
walk right past his own mother and she wouldn't recognize him.
Now that's a handy habit to have if you're Jack
the Ripper, isn't it. And he was always buying hand
me down clothes and costumes, and he would show up
dressed out landishly when you would go meet with people.
And he also would go to the Red Cross and
(21:22):
collect the uniforms of soldiers udyed And one of the
Ripper cases where a torso is found, the place where
it was found was notified by a man dressed as
a soldier who then vanished. There's all kinds of weird
things about people dressed as soldiers, including the very night
of the first Jack the Ripper murder, where two soldiers
were seen going off with the victim and it was
(21:44):
believed that a soldier did it. And ironically this soldier
was wearing a good conduct metal. Now that sounds exactly
like Secret's humor. To this day, I've wondered was that
really him dressed as a soldier. So he became the
actor that didn't work. And he he was also very artistic.
His father was an artist. Have you ever heard of
Punch and Judy. Well, his father was an artist for
(22:06):
Punch and Judy magazine and Germany, and I have seen
the drawings of the Punch and Judy stuff. Very violent,
by the way, really really violent. If you've ever looked
at Punch and Judy. It's a violent puppet act, hitting
people with sticks, hitting women with sticks and all this stuff.
And on some of the Jack the Ripper letters there
are little cartoon figures that look like Punch and Judy
(22:27):
hitting each other with sticks. It's just weird, and you go,
am I just imagining this? This is crazy. So he
was very talented by his DNA. He was drawing stuff
as a little kid. So he started going into art
and he became the apprentice to James McNeil Whistler. Well
Whistler magnificent artists. He's American born, which is interesting because
(22:49):
he and Sickret had a terrible adversarial relationship. I mean,
Whistler would not be easy to work with, but he
hated Whistler and was jealous of him, and it was
probably like the abuse father that he grew up with
that kind of father image. Well, interestingly enough, most of
the Ripper letters were the ones that are so famous,
begin with dear Boss. Well Boss was an American term.
(23:11):
Boss was not something that the British used back in
the eighteen eighties, and Whistler was American.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
He was born in Boston.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
In fact, his family was embroiled in the Civil War
back in the United States while he was in London,
you know, getting started as a big artist. So that's
when Secret became the artist. It was later on, It
wasn't right away, but he began to become very successful
and well known in later years. He actually gave art
lessons to Sir Winston Churchill. If you go to Blenham Palace,
(23:41):
you'll look at Churchill's artwork and it looks very, very
sickred esh. You know he learned this from his instructor.
I mean his artwork has been hanging in the royal palaces.
His shocking how he got around and people had no idea.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
What's your sense of his personality? I know that you
had said that he was described when he was a
child as being sort of unfeeling and distant.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
What was your sense as.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
He grew older. We know that he did not like Whistler.
It sounded like he could be a bit acerbic. Do
you have any details or any anecdotes of where we
just we get a real sense of what his personality
was like.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
I'll give you an example, something crude. He did the
Camden Town murder in nineteen oh seven. That was literally
in Camden Town where he had his art studio. He'd
had two art studios there at the time, and the victim,
Emily Dimmick, lived just around the corner and she was
basically entertaining all kinds of men when her husband would
go off. He was a chef on a train and
he would go away, you know, for nights on end,
(24:41):
and she'd have people over. So she was doing her
share of entertaining in this flat that they rented. Well,
the guy comes back from one of his train trips
in the doors locked, so he gets the landlady and
they have to go in and there she is in
bed with her throat cut. Well, the thing about it
is sicker. He would have people over for tea. And
when he was having people for over for tea wall
(25:02):
all this Camden Town murder stuff. There was a big trial.
They never caught the guy who did it. Secret what
you would call a lay figure, which was a mannequin
Back in the day. They'd look like a big wooden
puppet and you could sit it and use it to
help position a body and a drawing. These were very
crude and he had a very an old like seventeenth
eighteenth century lay figure and it looked like Pinocchio sort of,
(25:26):
and he would pretend he was murdering it and saying
it was the Camden Town murder. He would do this
to entertain his guests. It reminds you of the Preppy
murder when someone's shaking a rag doll and saying that
they're strangling the person. And that's what he would do,
outrageous things like that. Here's what's really creepy. He was
also a chef when there were body parts missing from
(25:46):
his victims.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Is there anything provable outside the Jack the Ripper murders?
Is there anything provable that he did that was violent?
I know that we've talked a little bit about speculation
people have gone missing, but was he ever arrested or
suspected of something outside of these cases totally under.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
The radar, not that we know of.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
But I'm not so sure because there's some very strange things.
For example, I went through you know, I went through
Whistler letters, James McNeill Whistler letters. We know that he
would have written around the time that this was all
going on, and very strangely he got summoned to Scotland Yard.
Whistler did and there was a letter he wrote to
someone where he was all in an uproar about he
(26:28):
was very upset about why he was having to go
to Scotland Yard. To this day we don't know what
they talked to him about. And the date on the letter,
I believe it's something like eighteen eighty seven or something,
or eighteen eighty six, which makes no sense if it
were about the Ripper because his crimes that we know
of didn't start till eighteen eighty eight. But I have
a feeling there were suspicions about him. Well, here's the
(26:51):
weird thing that happened. Whistler was supposed to go on
tour in America for his art stuff. Before he set
out on this tour, which I think he ended up
not doing, suddenly these same cities where he was supposed
to have an exhibit got letters claiming that Whistler was
Jack the Ripper. Now, who's even going to write something
like that? I mean, Whistler got so upset about all
(27:12):
of this, and that might be why he got dragged
into Scotland Yard. The date on the letter might be wrong,
but there.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
Are weird things.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
And why did John Grieve know about this? Now? I
know that there had been a book written some years
earlier that suggested Walter Sickert as Jack the Ripper. And
this was written by a woman whose mother was a
friend of one of Sickret's friends, another artist. And this
woman who I met with before she died, the one
who wrote the book about him. The tale that she
(27:39):
tells about her mother being in France and coming home
and having met up with this artist who was Sickret's friend,
and this horrible story about that he was painting murder pictures,
and there was a fear that he was actually one
doing these awful things. I mean, there's been rumors he
painted a picture, a portrait in nineteen oh seven when
a man he's looking out a shuttered window in this
(27:59):
bedroom and it's called Jack the Ripper's bedroom. He was
obsessed with Jack the Ripper, and he used to tell
tales about it. He used to say that at one
time he lived in a rooming house with Jack the Ripper.
These people have to talk about it. Their fantasies are overwhelming.
I mean, it'd be one thing if Siicret never mentioned it,
knew nothing about the case. But he's so in the
middle of it, and by his own virtue, which I
(28:21):
think in and of itself is very odd.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
What does his nephew say about your books or any
of this. Does he cooperate anything, does he agree with anything? Well,
I don't know what he says today.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
I don't even know if his nephews are still alive
because they were elderly then. And this was two thousand
and one when I met with him. No, he wrote
me a letter after I'd been to his place, when
he realized what I was doing, and he accused me
of being undercover and what I'd done was wrong, and
that told people that the fistula thing he never said that. Well,
that's a lie. I swear on my own life that
(28:55):
he said that. And I could show you the entry
in my journal that I wrote the minute in the car.
I guarantee you his family covered for him in his dotage,
No telling what he said. He used to get drunk
on champagne and stuff, and I go lock him in
the bedroom because no telling what he started rambling about.
I know he stalked people, that's for sure. He stoked
the actress Ellen Terry, who was kind of like the
(29:16):
Angelina Jolie of the day. One of the most beautiful
actresses of the day. He stalked her, and then he
stoked another woman many years later, where he'd written these
letters to this actress in Paris and he would leave
them at the stage door with no postage on it.
I mean, he definitely stalked people, but he was talented,
and he was charming, and he was part of the
(29:36):
upper class society, and he was protected by them, if
you ask.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Me, he still is. Now.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
There's I think an argument that he was not in town.
Was he not in France? Tell me more about that.
So the argument was that he was out of town
during some of these murders.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yes, he was in France most of the time, but
he was in and out of London. And how do
I know that. It's because when he his big thing
was to go to the music halls, which were filled
with sex workers.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
By the way.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
They would start late at evening and let out early,
like at midnight or early in the morning, always letting
out not long before the next ripper crime happened. So
he would go to these music halls and he would
draw what he saw on these little postcard size as
pieces of paper that he kept in his pocket with
a pencil. Well he dated those and there are several
(30:26):
I found that are dated in London at a certain
music hall within twenty four hours of a Ripper crime.
It was no big deal to take the steamer across
the English Channel. You could do it in one day,
and I think that's what he did after he committed
his crimes. He would go chill out somewhere, probably go
to the near steamer go and then go to his
family house in DP and that's where he did. His
most beautiful artwork was in France and dep But when
(30:49):
you get back to London, I think it brought out
the beast in him. And by the way, speaking of that,
it's not a coincidence that the Ripper crime started the
very time the Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde open at
the Lyceum Theater where Siccret used to work. The stage
manager was Bram Stoker, who wrote Dracula and Secret knew
all these people. Imagine that Jack the Ripper gave Winston
(31:09):
Churchill painting lessons.
Speaker 4 (31:10):
I mean, seriously, do you think any pushback that your
theory gets is because maybe you're an American who is
investigating the most famous case, not only in the world
but especially in the United Kingdom.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Well, I don't think that help matters. I don't think
it helped matters. I don't think it helped matters that
I was one of the top crime novelists in the
world at the time, that I did all that, and
flying around on private jets and driving ferraris and all
the rest of it. I don't blame people for thinking
what they did. Why take me seriously? I don't know
that I would have taken me seriously. I've been very
fortunate with my success and stuff, but at the heart
(31:48):
of things, I'm still that little reporter running around chasing
down a story and go find out everything I can.
And I don't summarily or casually accuse somebody a murder,
even if they've been dead for a long time. That's wrong.
And I still am accusing him. If I am ever
shown that he absolutely didn't do it, I would be
the first to take it all back and say, well,
(32:09):
I know he wrote some of the letters. Okay, I
know he did, and he admits he was obsessed with
the case, but it looks like he just piggybacked on
what someone else did. But I don't believe that. I
wish for his sake it were true. You know this
may sound weird to say, I find this all very sad.
This was a really supremely gifted person and I'm sorry
whatever happened to him as a child. And I know
(32:30):
his father was very cruel. When he would go out
on a stroll with the disabled sister, he would deliberately
walk her into walls and into hedges, and sicret learned, well,
he had a good role.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
Model for all that.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
You have some pretty incredible stories about Sickert, who I
had never heard of before, and not in the context
of Jack the Ripper. How were you able to get
like the story about the father intentionally running the daughter
into a wall.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Where does that come from?
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Some of that came from the document that his sister wrote,
but most of the telling things about Walter Sickert come
from the memoirs written by his artist friends, who had
no idea what they were revealing. A good example, he
was with this one artist friend one night and he said, oh,
let's go for a walk in the fog. It's a
(33:18):
very rim brand. So he picks up this gladstone bag,
you know those things that look like a big old
black doctor's bag, and weirdly. It's got a weird address,
something painted on it about a hedge or something strange.
And they go out into the fog and he says
he was taking her on a walk to show her
Jack the Ripper's world. They were going on a Jack
(33:38):
the Ripper walk. This is what he did, and she
was actually frightened. And there are other people that had
encounters with him that they reported as being very strange.
He wrote to a friend one time, at least you feel,
because he couldn't feel, couldn't feel anything. And I think
one of the reasons he did this stuff was to
feel something. And that's typical of a psychopath. They don't feel,
(34:01):
they don't feel remorse, they don't feel loved, they don't
feel attachments to people, and it must be a lonely,
miserable existence. And at one point, when he was in
a deep depression, living in France and writing, he wrote
a lot of letters. And I went through every letter
of his I could find, and there are a lot
of them. So I learned a lot from his letters
to by the way, and I had to have a
lot of them transcribed because his handwriting is so awful.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
I couldn't read him.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
But he wrote about listening to the water dripping into
a pot from the leaky roof in this place as
Hove as he was staying, and he wrote to his friend,
I am the most hunted man in England right now.
Now what does that mean? Very strange. So all of
this stuff, memoirs, Whistler's own memoirs, Whistler's letters, sick Art's letters, Oh,
(34:44):
his wife's letters, you know. I went to that archival
source Ellen Cobden, And what's very fascinating is when you
get to eighteen eighty eight, there's not a single letter
between him and her, even though they were separated much
at the time. She was traveling and he was alone
in London some of the time in the fall of
eighteen eighty eight, when he supposedly was in France all
(35:05):
the time, Oh no, he wasn't. But all of these
things they continue to add up to a composite of
something that's so far from normal. This guy was so
obsessed with all this there was no way you'd ever
keep up with it. And I believe that he's responsible
for a lot of the ripper Lord that's out there today.
I believe he might be the one who started the
Royal conspiracy based on story Secret himself told about a
(35:29):
sex worker who was across the street from a studio
in a tobacco shop, and that Prince Eddie went in
there and had an illegitimate child with her that they
then gave the scret to raise as his own. That's
for him, you know, And that's kind of a little
bit the kernel of what went on in the Royal conspiracy.
You know, Prince Eddie has been blamed, but there's no
evidence whatsoever that anybody connected to the royal family had
(35:53):
anything to do with this. And I think it's a
bunch of hooey.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
And you think he is responsible for more than just
the canonical five, more than the additional two. You think
there are many more victims. And when did it stop?
Why would it stop? What you think he's responsible for.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
The canonical five is a bunch of malarkey, because it
was that term was invented or coined by the former
Commissioner of the London City Police, who wasn't even present
for the Ripper crimes. I have in my possession the
original Times newspapers from eighteen eighty eight. I have every
single one of them. They're in books, this big bound
in leather at one on the table right over there.
(36:30):
You can't see it. And I went through all the
original newspaper stories. In the early days of the investigation,
they referred to seven murders so far seven, then it
became five because of the memoir this constable wrote many
years later. First of all, they didn't understand that with
sexual psychopaths, they don't always do everything exactly the same
(36:51):
way things progress. They start out as you cut someone's throat,
then you open them up, then you take their introls
out and throw them on the pavement. Then you get
to Mary Kelly, where you flay her to the bone,
and you steal every organ except her brain. Oh well,
excuse me, you remove every organ except her brain. And
he did steal her heart. He took her heart, but
her other organs were very irreverently placed under her head.
(37:15):
You know, he just probably spent hours with that particular body.
So anybody I showed a picture of Mary Kelly, we
have a couple of crime scenes pictures of her. The
only in existence are the ones of Mary Kelly because
someone showed up with one of those old wooden box cameras.
And I have an original photograph. I should have pulled
it out and shown it to you of her body
on the bed and her whole face is gone or
(37:38):
she's been flayed. You can see the black line around
her lower leg where he's getting ready to amputate that
below the knee, because he's cut an incision there, removed
her whole face, cut off her breast, took out her organs,
and you go, how is it a far reach to
think that someone who would do that might not be
dismembering people, and that you're why are you not thinking
that this guy is the one who's leaving Torso scattered out.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
So the ripper, the kind of conventional ripper timeline ends
in eighteen ninety two, is that right?
Speaker 3 (38:07):
I don't know when he ended.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
I mean that the Camden Town murder was nineteen oh seven,
but you know how long he may have killed after that,
I don't know, but it probably began to dissipate the
older you get. And you probably can see that in
his art workers after his Camden Town paintings. They're the
ones that made him famous, the Camden Town series of
paintings that all show women who look dead, they look murdered,
(38:31):
all sprawled on a bed. These nudes, they do not
look like art. They look like violent pornography if you
ask me. But that would show that imagination was still
being very much fueled, you know, if you want to
think of it in extremists. One goes out to do
research to get inspiration for a story, I go to
the morgue, but I don't cause the bodies to show
(38:52):
up there. That's the difference. But this is how I
think he got his artistic inspiration was through the violence
that he perpetrated, and I think at some point he quit.
Now it is interesting that one of the other things
that's creepy he'd moved to France for a while. He
was in and out of France all the time, and
he bought a former police department there as his home.
It had bedrooms that had been former jail cells, and
(39:13):
that's where he lived when his second wife died. She
also had physical problems. He was feeble and had money,
and he was such a disgusting person that when she
died there are letters at the Tate to him writing
her relatives constantly asking for money for her headstone and
all the rest. He didn't bother having her headstone engraved.
(39:34):
I'm pretty sure he poisoned her with morphine. He decided
it was time for her to go because she did
you know, he was in charge of giving her morphine.
And he had met Cherise Lasour and as soon as
as this one was dead, Cherise Lsur took him under
her wing. And that was his third wife and she
supported him too.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
He died in nineteen forty two. Can we just talk
about the end of his life and what you know
about it and sort of how to wrap up him
and him as a care character. We know how everything
has gone up until then. What do we think about
the last decade of his life?
Speaker 2 (40:06):
He got more and more peculiar. You know, he didn't
drink in his early years, and then he started drinking.
This one actress that he was stalking in France, who
I mean these women, they actually would even go on
a carriage ride with him. They didn't realize what was
going on here. I mean, Ellen Terry would have secret
help her run errands. Meanwhile he's walking past her house
(40:26):
at night, staring through the windows, you know. And this
Gwen frank Jan Davies, the French actress, I think she
went on a carriage ride and had lunch with him
once and he had downed two bottles of champagne, And
so I imagine that his wife, his third wife, get
him tucked into his bedroom and hush him up. So
he didn't tell wild stories. So he was known for that.
But he was very much respected until I think close
(40:50):
to the end of his days. I think he was
rather much getting becoming forgotten. But he had an honorary
PhD from the University of Manchester. He taught art, he
wrote about art. I think in his very late days
he had a lot of health problems. He was he
supposedly his cause of death, for one thing, was like
constant kidney infections and urinary tract infections and all of
this was probably the sequela to his early surgeries and
(41:12):
having a lot of scar tissue and strictures and things
the damage that would have been caused by that, and
that's what he died of. But he wasn't young. He
was almost eighty two. That's what's so weird. You realize
that he lived to see the first movies about Jack
the Ripper, this one behind Me, the Lodger, And by
the way that Lodger was based on the story by
(41:32):
the author who sat next to a man at a
dinner who claimed he had lived in the same rooming
house with Jack the Ripper. Well, who do you think
that might have been that night? It was probably sicker
And that became the basis of her book The Lodger
that then became the first movie.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
This guy, he.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
Was, this publicity junkie. He had, He had his own
clipping service. I went through all that too, all the microfilm.
I had all of it printed, including stuff that went
back to his childhood that was written in some form
of German that I had to have somebody translated into
bottom Jar and then have translated into English. And that's
where I learned stories about his father, who was very
similar to Secred, who was always wandering around, would disappear
(42:08):
for days on end. Siicred would take his wife Ellen
out for her birthday. He'd get up to go use
the bathroom or do something and never come back to
the table. She never knew where he was. He would
disappear for days on end. It wasn't until the last
year of her life that she finally wrote him off
and stopped dealing with him. This was about nineteen fourteen,
I believe, and she changed her will the last year
(42:32):
of her life to include that she would have an
autopsy on death. Now why would she do that. I
think she was afraid she was going to be murdered
by him. I think he poisoned people too, just so
you know, because right after he got with Ellen in
eighteen eighty seven, his own father suddenly died of some
neurological flare up, something that had to do with his brain,
(42:52):
and he died. And then not long after that, Ellen's
younger sister, who was only in her twenties, she came
down with some weird neural logical something fever and all
the rest, and she died. Well, just so you know,
the painting studios used a lot of things that were poisonous,
like Oarsnick there were poisons glore back in those days.
We don't know, but he would have loved the power
(43:15):
of watching someone getting sicker every day because of something
he's given them in their tea or their food, or
who knows what. And I think that Ellen, I mean,
why would you want an autopsy? She's a proper upper
class lady who wants an autopsy? In nineteen friggin fourteen,
and he had himself cremated when he died. Not many
people did that either.
Speaker 1 (43:34):
So I would say, of all the theories that I've heard,
yours is more valid, if not certainly as valid as
the ones that have been thrown out there to wrap
up Jack the Ripper. Though, what will it take do
you think to finally, definitively solve this case for everyone?
Is it coming up with DNA real DNA from one
(43:56):
of the crime scenes and you can compare it to
sickard and that's or do you think I think we're
done right?
Speaker 3 (44:01):
There's nothing to be done.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
You could dig up his remains, his creamines, and now
DNA testing is sensitive enough that you might be lucky
and get his DNA profile, But good luck getting permission
to exhume him or any of his victims that's been
in discussions before. You'd have to get the government to
approve that, and you'd have to have really good justification
for it. Even so, I don't The only thing you
(44:24):
could ever prove is that he wrote the letters. You're
not going to find his DNA on somebody that's been
in the ground for one hundred and thirty years after
it's been in the dead house. They threw the clothes
out in the alleyway. We don't have any of the
clothing of the victims. They didn't save things like that
back then. In fact, the ragpickers they would come around
and collect rags like the clothing thrown in an alleyway.
They would sell it to paper mills. Imagine this. They
(44:48):
would bleach it and they would take the paper and
the linens and stuff the cotton, whatever, and they would
turn it into fine stationary, the very fine stationary. That
secret was writing his ripper letters one on. Some of
it came from clothing of poppers, and that's something the
chain of life, the chain of death.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
Are you as enthusiastic about your fiction books as you
are about this book, because if you are even more
enthusiastic about the fiction series, I can't even imagine what
you're like on a book tour, because you are just
it's like you're bleeding this. You really believe it, and
you have done a tremendous amount of research.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
You know, if anybody listened to the evidence I look at,
if you look at the evidence that I have, and
I have to be quick to tell people I didn't
analyze this stuff. I didn't do the DNA testing, and
the DNA that we did get is inclusive. We don't
have secrets DNA, but we got a profile from a
ripper letter that had never been laminated or treated by
(45:46):
the conservationist, and so it gave us some good DNA.
That most of the stuff had been destroyed. You're not
going to get anything off of it because they would
take the letter in the envelope and they would put
a laminated piece of plastic over it. Can you imagine
like you do heating a decal for a T shirt?
So what do you expect is going to be left.
You're ruining the handwriting, you're ruining the DNA, You're ruining everything.
(46:09):
They never should have done that. I'm sorry, but they
shouldn't have. But we don't know whose DNA any of
that is when you're getting it off an envelope, because
remember back in those days, a lot of people sealed
envelopes with a sponge. You might find Whistler's DNA on
a letter that Sickert sealed in his studio. So no,
I'm not going to prove it through that probably and
nobody else is either, I don't think Unless I tell
(46:31):
you what would be really telling, there is a ripper
letter that has I mentioned it a woodprint on it,
this face, and he says, this is Jack the Ripper.
Ain't I a handsome guy? Or something like that? People
thought it was a drawing. Tell I took an art
historian to look at it in the public record office,
and she looked at the original and she said, this
isn't a drawing. She said, this is a woodcut. And
(46:52):
she said this is a good enough woodcut to hang
in a fricking gallery. You know that you could carve
this face on a piece of wood like an etching,
put it an InCor put it on the letter. Well, now, oh,
wouldn't it be a nice thing if it turned out
that and Sicret's memorabilia that he left behind with his
family there happened to be that woodcut in a gladstone bag.
(47:14):
Then the one he carried everywhere. Now that's never turned up,
and if it did, I suspect certain parties would not
come clean about it. But even that could be argued,
where did he get it? And just because he sent
a letter doesn't mean he killed anybody, right, So I
think what I would simply suggest is that if people
should look at the evidence, read it in my book,
everything I say is true. If there's a if it's not,
(47:35):
it's just an honest mistake, like a street sign that
I get the name wrong or something. But the science
in it is actually just the truth. I mean. Peter
Bauer is the one that did the paper analysis, and
the Tait hired him to show what an idiot I was.
They were going to show that he was going to
look at the paper and show that this didn't match
anything they had to do with sicret Instead, he was
the one who proved it did, proved it did, and
(47:57):
even called me one time. He says, oh my god,
this one watermark. It was at the Getty in California,
and he said, this is the best one I've seen.
He said, I need to look at this in person.
So he flew all the way to LA and looked
at it in person. And that's the one that was
like six pieces of paper out of twenty four, and
three of them were ripper letters and the other three
were secret letters. And I show you the pictures of
(48:19):
those in my book. There's something going on there, and
maybe I don't have it dead right. No pun intended
about what he actually did, But I'm telling you he's
connected to all this, and I do think he did it.
I think that you don't confess the way these Ripper letters.
They're violent, they're awful, they're crude, they hate women, they
hate the authority.
Speaker 3 (48:38):
His father hated authority.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
He would write about the police and how much he
hated him in his German letters and stuff. But I'm
never going to prove it any more than anybody else
probably will, and I don't really care. I mean, it's
not about being right. I don't care anymore whether people
think I'm right. I hope that people think I did
a credible job, because most of all, I would want
to have integrity and be ethical. Would never say something
(49:01):
that I believe isn't true. And like I said it,
the day comes that we find out that he absolutely
couldn't have done it for some reason, I'd be the
first to want to know all about it, because it's
not about me, it's about truth.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(49:47):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer, artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hartstark, Kilgaiff and Danielle Kramer.
Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold more Wicked and
on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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