This is one of the best non-fiction books that I have read; very well written, well detailed and extremely informative. Patricia Cornwell's research is not only fascinating but compelling and convincing.

Cornwell's research presents damn near irrefutable, extensive forensic evidence that Walter Sickert is Jack the Ripper. Cornwell does an amazing job explaining the psychological profile of Walter Sickert that adds to her proof that he very well could be the infamous Jack the Ripper. She holds nothing back, giving us readers, in great depth, all the gore and gruesomeness.

She also tells, in great detail, of the deplorable conditions the poor had to endure in 1880’s London, England, which I found captivating.

I have always been fascinated with all things related to Jack the Ripper. So much so that when in London, my husband and I did the “THE ORIGINAL JACK THE RIPPER MURDERS TOUR”, https://www.jack-the-ripper-tour.com/.... Now whether or not Walter Sickert is The Ripper, I couldn't say 100% one way or another. However, I can say if you are a Ripperologist, this is definitely worth a go!

The day of Christine’s funeral was blustery and cold, and the procession was late. Sickert didn’t pour her ashes into her grave. He dug his hands inside the urn and flung them into the wind, which blew them onto the coats and into the face of his friends.

Who was Christine? Sickert’s third wife… and who was Sickert??? The world famous artist… and a psychopathic serial killer calling himself, “Jack The Ripper”… who killed the innocent in many ways. Most of the victims were children and women. After brutal slaying or ripping his victims apart, he wrote many (200+) letters to the Metropolitan Police. His childish, mocking comments, hateful teases and taunts in his letter includes, “What a dance I am leading”, “I am Jack The Ripper catch me if you can”, “Oh! It was such a jolly job the last one”, “The police pass me close every day, and I shall pass one going to post this”, “Just a line to let you know that I love my work”…




By using modern forensic technology, Patricia Cornwell has exposed the artist as the author of the Ripper letters. She owns more than thirty of the Sickert’s painting and she believes that the artwork closely resembles the Ripper crime scenes. And she has also claimed that some of the letters written by someone purporting to be the killer, had the same watermark as some of Sickert's writing paper.



Sickert's sketch, "He Killed his Father in a Fight".

I picked up this book at a used bookstore for like $1 in 2007 and really, I'm embarrassed to admit that I really didn't know much about Jack the Ripper until I read the book. And by "not much," I mean I thought it was a fiction book. After all, I was buying a bunch of other Cornwell novels so why would I think that she had delved into non-fiction? Egh, lesson learned (and now there are also smartphones so if I find myself in a used bookstore confronted with a book that I'm not sure is fiction or non-fiction, well, google is my friend).
Anyway, so I brought the book along with me to Mexico in 2009, read the entire book in a few days and was fascinated that:
1) It was now 2009 and we still had no idea whodunnit in a murder spree that took place in 1888.
2) Wow, was London ever a shithole in 1888!
and 3) You know, I have no idea who Walter Sickert is, but I don't really think he was Jack the Ripper.

And that, my friends, was the problem with the whole book. You see, it's really hard to convince someone that "Jack the Ripper - CASE CLOSED" is actually closed when the entirety of the evidence is really not that thorough. A lot of it seemed really far fetched. The reality is that until there is a tried and true confession hidden somewhere deep in an archive somewhere from a reliable source, we will probably never find out who Jack the Ripper is. And to use very shaky evidence to try and close the case? No. Just no. I'm not a writer, nor do I play one on TV, but I think Cornwell only had 2 successes with this whole book.
1) I decided to find out more about who Jack the Ripper was and read about/watch documentaries on other theories (that seem a whole lot more plausible).
2) Hey, it's a pretty successful manual on how NOT to write a "case closed" book.
Patricia- I love your books and Kay Scarpetta is awesome, but please, just stick to fiction.

Hey lady! Don't write a book saying you solved a case when the best you can do every other line is something "probably" or "may certainly" have happened.

I really hated this book, it was more of a messed up theory than set facts... I agree with almost nothing in this book. It was well written, though. So at least there's that. It really surprised me that the author just went right in, basically introducing who she thought the killer was. I just- I don't know it was more based on opinion than facts and I lost interest very very early on, not even into chapter four. It gets a 2 star for the writing but missing 3 because of the lack of facts and being opinion based.

Can’t get into this. It reads like a bad high school persuasive essay and I just want to scribble things like “PROOF?” in the margins. And I’m not an English teacher!

amazing research of Cornwell but i am not sure that this is the final and end of Jack the Ripper as he will continue to absorb our imegination for decades to come

No mysteries here, when Cornwell says "Case Closed", she means that within the first two pages, she's going to tell you Jack the Ripper's real name, and the other 350ish pages are just details about why he is who she says he is. I came into this with the barest bones knowledge about the Ripper mystery in general, and a vague idea that it was probably a guy with medical training but no one had ever been certain- but Cornwell lays it all out there, and her clues are compelling.

If what she has is, by today's standards, 'circumstantial' evidence, it's damning stuff. She, and her entire team it seems, truly believe they've found their man, and he didn't commit suicide, or get carted off to an obscure lunatic asylum in 1890. He lived to see both world wars, trotted gleefully across England and the Continent, likely killed far more women and children than we generally associate with the Ripper murders and was relatively famous during his lifetime. Is still relatively famous in the art world, apparently.

Portrait of a Killer is as much a history of Cornwell and her team's research over a century after the Ripper named himself, as it is a history of the Ripper and his victims, and these parallel stories are fascinating. This was a massive, communal effort, and the passion and dedication everyone brought to the project shows. Excellent all the way around, Cornwell and her team may have, indeed, solved one of the greatest mysteries of the past two centuries.

4.5

Vejam a minha opinião em vídeo, AQUI.

Patricia Cornwall is a terrible writer, but I was interested in her ideas about Jack the Ripper. I shouldn't have bothered. This book is poorly organized and does not convince me at all that Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. I would not recommend this book to anyone actually interested in the Jack the Ripper case.

Patricia Cornwell is an author I both admire and enjoy, which is one reason why reading JACK THE RIPPER- CASE CLOSED is so mind boggling. Cornwell claims to have identified Jack the Ripper more than a century after the fact and even prefaces the book with a passage where she is tormented about accusing even a dead man (painter Walter Sickert) of such ghastly crimes, and considers not publishing this book. But in the end, she says, she had to publish it, because she knows the truth. She's sure of it.

And yet what follows piles conjecture on top of conjecture, and in fact ignores a lot of basic criminology, in an attempt to make her case. I personally have no idea whether or not Sickert was Jack the Ripper (though it seems unlikely); however, I am certain that no evidence is given here.

To be fair, Cornwell convincingly demonstrates that Sickert had troubling relationships with women and may have eroticized the idea of violence against women. This, however, does not make someone a serial killer; it is a depressingly common mindset. He was also very interested in the Ripper murders - and yet, this has been true of thousands if not millions of people ever since the crimes occurred.

Beyond this, she has no evidence, only suppositions. Sickert underwent some form of surgery on his penis as a child. Cornwell postulates that no anesthetic was used, that the birth defect was severe, that he was held down on the operating bed by a female nurse and so his hatred of women was born ... except there is no proof that anesthetic wasn't used. Anesthesia had not been universally adopted at that time, but it was no longer uncommon, either. There is also no proof that his defects were as terrible as she suggests. So this is only a theory -- not implausible, but far from proved.

Other suppositions are implausible in the extreme. For instance, she takes it for granted that virtually all of the "Ripper letters" -- anonymous notes sent to the police claiming to be by Jack the Ripper -- were authentic. While experts wonder about one or two of these notes, there were literally THOUSANDS of them, almost universally recognized as crank letters, the kind of thing trolls did before they had the internet to despoil. Cornwell seems to believe in them all, drawing tenuous links between some sent years after the Whitechapel murders and various crimes that occurred in London and France. There is one link to an unusual bit of stationery that Sickert also owned pages of, so I suppose it is possible that he wrote one -- maybe not surprising, given his obsession with the case. But again, it's not certain, and based on the more factual information she gives us about Sickert, he seems more likely to write a fake letter than to be a serial killer. The obvious differences in handwriting are ascribed to Sickert being clever and artistic.

She also tries to connect many, many other crimes committed in future decades to Sickert -- murders of children, strangulations, etc. -- presumably to fill in the very long gap between the end of the Whitechapel murders and Sickert's death decades later. However, virtually anyone who works on serial murders will say that it is extremely rare for a killer to switch from such a definite method/choice of victim to something so radically different. (Former FBI profiler John E. Douglas' THE CASES THAT HAUNT US not only details this but also provides a more plausible idea of the sort of person most likely to have been Jack the Ripper.)

Most troubling is Cornwell's willingness to flatly ignore information that goes against her core premise. She argues that, as a result of his birth defect and subsequent surgery (which she postulates might have been botched), Sickert probably couldn't reach orgasm or have an erection. That would make somebody angry and twisted, right? Except that Sickert was married three times and for a while took a mistress; contemporary rumors even suggested he and the mistress had a child. I can see that someone unable to have sex might marry, particularly in a more conformist age -- but three times? And why a mistress?

Cornwell even cites "DNA evidence" in this book, when she cannot actually establish the source of one of her DNA samples, and the "commonality" reported is something shared by one in one hundred people. One out of a hundred is NOT proof. Think about how many people would match that sample at the average NFL game.

What kept striking me, as I read this book, was that if this exact same theory were posited in a novel, I'd go with it. But the suspension of disbelief a reader gives a novel is far from the same mindset with which a reader looks at a book claiming to know absolutely who committed a series of murders. Had Cornwell written a work of fiction around these same theories, it would have been a thrilling and disturbing read. But it is inexplicable that she could consider this book to offer any proof of fact.

I still enjoy Cornwell's fiction and will read more of her books in the future. But this is mostly interesting for the opportunity to watch someone extremely educated and intelligent fooling herself.