“Has anyone ever tried to use modern forensic science to solve these crimes?” I asked.
“No,” John Grieve said, and he gave me a very short list of very weak suspects. “There’s one other interesting chap you might want to check out, as long as you’re going to look into it. An artist named Walter Sickert. He painted some murder pictures. In one of them in particular, a clothed man is sitting on the edge of a bed with the body of the nude prostitute he just murdered. It’s called The Camden Town Murder. I’ve always wondered about him.”
It wasn’t the first time Sickert had been connected with Jack the Ripper’s crimes. Most people have always found the notion laughable.
I began to wonder about Sickert when I was flipping through a book of his art. The first plate I landed on was an 1887 painting of the well-known Victorian performer Ada Lundberg at the Marylebone Music Hall. She is supposed to be singing but looks as if she is screaming as the leering, menacing men look on. I am sure there are artistic explanations for all of Sickert’s works. But what I see when I look at them is morbidity, violence, and a hatred of women. As I continued to follow Sickert and the Ripper, I began to see unsettling parallels. Some of his paintings bear a chilling resemblance to mortuary and scene photographs of Jack the Ripper’s victims.
I noticed murky images of clothed men reflected in mirrors inside gloomy bedrooms where nude women sit on iron bedsteads. I saw impending violence and death. I saw a victim who had no reason to fear the charming, handsome man who had just coaxed her into a place and state of utter vulnerability. I saw a diabolically creative mind, and I saw evil.
I began adding layer after layer of circumstantial evidence to the physical evidence discovered by modern forensic science and expert minds.
All along, forensic scientists and I have hoped for DNA. But it would be a year and more than a hundred tests later before we would begin to see the first shadows of the 75- to 114-year-old genetic evidence that Walter Sickert and Jack the Ripper left when they touched and licked postage stamps and envelope flaps. Cells from the inside of their mouths sloughed off into their saliva and were sealed in adhesive until DNA scientists apprehended the genetic markers with tweezers, sterile water, and cotton swabs.
The best result came from a Ripper letter that yielded a single-donor mitochondrial DNA sequence, specific enough to eliminate 99% of the population as the person who licked and touched the adhesive backing of that stamp. This same DNA sequence profile turned up as a component of another Ripper letter, and two Walter Sickert letters.
Genetic locations from this DNA sequence were found on other Sickert items, such as coveralls he wore when he painted. The DNA in all but the single-donor Ripper stamp is mixed with other genetic sequence profiles from other people. (This is neither surprising nor damning.) The DNA evidence is the oldest ever tested in a criminal case.
This is only the beginning. We aren’t finished with our DNA testing and other types of forensic analyses. These could go on for years as the technology advances at an exponential rate.
There is other physical evidence as well. Forensic scientists as well as art, paper, and lettering experts found the following: a Ripper letter written on artists’ paper; watermarks on paper used in Ripper letters that match watermarks on paper used by Walter Sickert; Ripper letters written with the waxy-soft crayonlike ground used in lithography; Ripper letters with paint or ink applied with a paintbrush. A microscopic exam revealed that the “dried blood” on Ripper letters is consistent with the oil-and-wax mixtures used in etching ground, and under ultraviolet light it fluoresced milky white, which is also consistent with etching ground. Art experts say that sketches in Ripper letters are professional and are consistent with Walter Sickert’s art works and technique.
As an interesting aside, a blood-detection test conducted on the blood-like etching ground smeared and painted on Ripper letters came up as inconclusive – which is very unusual. Two possible explanations are as follows: It could be a reaction to microscopic particles of copper, since in this type of testing copper could cause inconclusive results or a false positive; or it could be the presence of blood mixed with the brown etching ground.