Dr. Paul Ferrara, director of the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, made the first watermark connection when we were examining original Ripper and Sickert letters in London and Glasgow. Transparencies of the letters and their watermarks were submitted to the Institute, and when the Ripper partial watermark and a Sickert complete watermark were scanned into a forensic image-enhancement computer and superimposed on the video screen, they matched identically.
In September 2001, the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine received permission from the British government to conduct nondestructive forensic testing on the original Ripper letters at the Public Record Office in Kew. Dr. Ferrara, DNA analyst Lisa Schiermeier, forensic image enhancement expert Chuck Pruitt, and others traveled to London, and we examined the Ripper letters. Some of what seemed the most promising envelopes – ones that still had flaps and stamps intact – were moistened and painstakingly peeled back for swabbing. Photographs were taken and handwriting was compared.
From London, we went on to other archival collections and examined paper, and took DNA samples from the letters, envelopes, and stamps of Walter Richard Sickert; his first wife, Ellen Cobden Sickert; James Mc-Neill Whistler; and so-called Ripper suspect Montague John Druitt. Some of these tests were exclusionary. Obviously, neither Ellen Sickert nor Whistler has ever been a suspect, but Walter Sickert worked in Whistler’s studio. He mailed letters for him and was in close physical contact with the Master and his belongings. It is possible that Whistler’s DNA – and certainly Ellen’s DNA – could have contaminated Sickert evidence.
We swabbed Whistler envelopes and stamps at the University of Glasgow, where his massive archival collection is kept. We swabbed envelopes and stamps at the West Sussex Record Office, where Ellen Cobden Sickert’s family archives – and, coincidentally, some of Montague John Druitt’s family archives – are kept. Unfortunately, the only Druitt sample available to us was the letter he wrote in 1876 while he was a student at Oxford University. The DNA results from the envelope’s flap and stamp are contaminated, but will be retested.
Other documents yet to be tested are two envelopes I believe were addressed and sealed by the Duke of Clarence, and an envelope of Queen Victoria’s physician, Dr. William Gull. I do not believe that Druitt or any of these so-called suspects had a thing to do with murder and mutilation, and I would like to clear their names if I can. DNA testing will continue until all practical means are exhausted. The importance extends far beyond the Ripper investigation.
There is no one left to indict and convict. Jack the Ripper and all who knew him well have been dead for decades. But there is no statute of limitations on homicide, and the Ripper’s victims deserve justice. And whatever we can learn that furthers our knowledge of forensic science and medicine is worth the trouble and expense. I was not optimistic we would set a DNA match, but I was surprised and quite crestfallen when the first round of testing turned up not a single sign of human life in all fifty-five samples. I decided to try again, this time swabbing different areas of the same envelopes and stamps.
Still, we came up with nothing. There are a number of possible explanations for these disappointing results: The one-billionth of a gram of cells in human saliva that would have been deposited on a stamp or envelope flap did not survive the years; heat used to laminate the Ripper letters for conservation destroyed the nuclear DNA; suboptimal storage for a hundred years caused degradation and destruction of the DNA; or perhaps the adhesives were the culprit.
The “glutinous wash,” as adhesives were called in the mid-nineteenth century, was derived from plant extracts, such as the bark of the acacia tree. During the Victorian era, the postal system underwent an industrial revolution, with the first Penny Black stamp mailed on May 2, 1840, from Bath. The envelope folding machine was patented in 1845. Many people did not want to lick envelopes or stamps for “sanitary” reasons, and used a sponge. To add to the scientific odds against us when we swabbed envelopes and stamps, we could not possibly know who had licked their envelopes and who had not. The last genetic option left for us was to try a third round of testing, this time for mitochondrial DNA.