Patricia Cornwell – Portrait Of A Killer Jack The Ripper

The clean single-donor sequence recovered from the partial stamp on the back of the Openshaw envelope is our best basis of comparison. Its sequence is the three markers, 16294 – 73 – 263, or the locations of DNA base positions in the mitochondrial regions – rather much as A7, G10, D12, and so on indicate places on a map. The five samples that have this same 16294 – 73 – 263 single-donor Openshaw sequence are the front stamp from the Openshaw envelope; an Ellen Sickert envelope; an en­velope from a Walter Sickert letter; a stamp from a Walter Sickert enve­lope; and a Ripper envelope with a stain that tests positive for blood, but which may be too degraded to determine if it is human.

The results from the Ellen Sickert letter could be explained if she moistened the envelope and stamp with the same sponge her husband, Walter, used – assuming either one of them used a sponge. Or Sickert might have touched or licked the adhesive on the flap or stamp, perhaps because he mailed the letter for her.

Other samples contained one or two markers found in the single-donor Openshaw sequence. For example, a set of white coveralls that Sickert wore while painting had a mixture of markers that included 73 and 263. What is startling about this result is that there was a result. The coveralls are about eighty years old and had been washed, ironed, and starched before they were donated to the Tate Archive. I saw no point in swabbing around the collar, the cuffs, the crotch, and the armpits, but we did it anyway.

The Openshaw letter that yielded the mitochondrial DNA results was written on A Pirie &; Sons stationery. The letter is postmarked October 29, 1888, mailed in London, and reads:

ENVELOPE: Dr. Openshaw

Pathological curator

London Hospital

White chapel

LETTER: Old boss you was rite it was

the left kidny i was goin to

hopperate agin close to your

ospitle just as i was goin

to dror mi nife along of

er bloomin throte them

cusses of coppers spoilt

the game but i guess i wil

be on the job soon and will

send you another bit of

innerds Jack the ripper

O have you seen the devle

with his mikerscope and scalpul

a lookin at a Kidney

with a slide cocked up

One reason I believe this letter is genuine is that it is so blatantly con­trived. The bad handwriting looks disguised and is jarringly inconsistent with the handwriting of someone with access to pen and ink and fine-quality watermarked stationery. The address on the envelope is literate, the spelling perfect, which is vastly different from the overblown illiter­acy of the letter with its inconsistent misspellings, such as “kidny” and -Kidney,” “wil” and “will,” “of” and “o.” Steward P. Evans and Keith Skinner point out in their extremely helpful book jack the Ripper: Let­ters from Hell that the postscript in the Dr. Openshaw letter alludes to i verse in an 1871 Cornish folktale:

Here’s to the devil,

With his wooden pick and shovel,

Digging tin by the bushel,

With his tail cock’d up!

An allusion to a Cornish folktale makes no sense if we are supposed to believe this Openshaw letter was written by an uneducated homicidal maniac who ripped a kidney from a victim and sent it off in the mail.

Walter Sickert visited Cornwall as a boy. He painted in Cornwall when he was Whistler’s apprentice. Sickert knew Cornwall and the Cornish people. He was well read and was familiar with folk tunes and music-hall songs. It is unlikely that a poor, uneducated person from London spent time in Cornwall or sat around in the slums reading Cornish folk­tales.

One could argue – and should – that the absence of a reliable known reference source, in this instance Walter Sickert’s DNA, suggests we are assuming without conclusive scientific evidence that the single-donor se­quence from the Openshaw letter was deposited by Walter Sickert, alias Jack the Ripper. We can’t assume any such thing.

Although statistically the single-donor sequence excludes 99% of the population, in Dr. Ferrara’s words, “The matching sequences might be a coincidence. They might not be a coincidence.” At best, we have a “cau­tious indicator” that the Sickert and Ripper mitochondrial DNA se­quences may have come from the same person.