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Written by Patricia Daniels Cornwell - Audio book narrated by Kate Reading - Unabridged Fiction - 10 CASSETTES - 13.5 hours

Publisher, Putnam Berkley Audio (November 2002)

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“No doubt there will always be skeptics, and critics tainted by self-interest who will refuse to accept that [Walter] Sickert was a serial killer, a damaged diabolical man driven by megalomania and hate. There will be those who will argue that it’s all coincidence. As FBI profiler Ed Sulzbach says, ‘There really aren’t many coincidences in life. And to call coincidence after coincidence after coincidence a coincidence is just plain stupid.” —Patricia Cornwell

In the fall of 1888, all of London was held in the grip of unspeakable terror. An elusive madman calling himself Jack the Ripper was brutally butchering women in the slums of London’s East End. Police seemed powerless to stop the killer, who delighted in taunting them and whose crimes were clearly escalating in violence from victim to victim. And then the Ripper’s violent spree seemingly ended as abruptly as it had begun. He had struck out of nowhere and then vanished from the scene. Decades passed, then fifty years, then a hundred, and the Ripper’s bloody sexual crimes became anemic and impotent fodder for puzzles, mystery weekends, crime conventions, and so-called “Ripper Walks” that end with pints of ale in the pubs of Whitechapel. But to number-one New York Times bestselling novelist Patricia Cornwell, the Ripper murders are not cute little mysteries to be transformed into parlor games or movies but rather a series of terrible crimes that no one should get away with, even after death. Now Cornwell applies her trademark skills for meticulous research and scientific expertise to dig deeper into the Ripper case than any detective before her—and reveal the true identity of this fabled Victorian killer.

In Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed, Cornwell combines the rigorous discipline of twenty-first century police investigation with forensic techniques undreamed of during the late Victorian era to solve one of the most infamous and difficult serial murder cases in history. Drawing on unparalleled access to original Ripper evidence, documents, and records, as well as archival, academic, and law-enforcement resources, FBI profilers, and top forensic scientists, Cornwell reveals that Jack the Ripper was none other than a respected painter of his day, an artist now collected by some of the world’s finest museums: Walter Richard Sickert.

It has been said of Cornwell that no one depicts the human capability for evil better than she. Adding layer after layer of circumstantial evidence to the physical evidence discovered by modern forensic science and expert minds, Cornwell shows that Sickert, who died peacefully in his bed in 1942, at the age of 81, was not only one of Great Britain’s greatest painters but also a serial killer, a damaged diabolical man driven by megalomania and hate. She exposes Sickert as the author of the infamous Ripper letters that were written to the Metropolitan Police and the press. Her detailed analysis of his paintings shows that his art continually depicted his horrific mutilation of his victims, and her examination of this man’s birth defects, the consequent genital surgical interventions, and their effects on his upbringing present a casebook example of how a psychopathic killer is created.

New information and startling revelations detailed in Portrait of a Killer include:

-- How a year-long battery of more than 100 DNA tests—on samples drawn by Cornwell’s forensics team in September 2001 from original Ripper letters and Sickert documents—yielded 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.
-- A comprehensive look at the physical evidence uncovered by paper experts including watermarks on the paper used by Jack the Ripper for his taunting letters to the police and to newspapers that matched watermarks and paper used by Walter Sickert for his private correspondence.
-- An account of what happened when Cornwell presented her case to John Grieve, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard and the most respected investigator in Great Britain. Cornwell asked Grieve what he would have done had he been the detective at the time of the Ripper murders and had he known about the vast array of circumstantial evidence she had gathered implicating Sickert. Grieve told the author he would have immediately put Sickert under surveillance and obtained search warrants. Even if those steps had resulted in no additional evidence, he would have put the case before the crown prosecutor.
-- Blow-by-blow recreations of the murders of Martha Tabram, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddows, and Mary Kelly. Cornwell describes the final hours of the victims’ lives, the discovery of the bodies, and the autopsies and inquests that followed. She examines the mistakes, assumptions, and false conclusions reached by doctors, coroners, and the police as they generated their theories of the crimes. And with an eye toward what modern forensic psychologists now know about serial murderers, she reexamines important elements of the Ripper killings that were given little weight by investigators at the time.
-- Intriguing indications that Sickert’s killing spree did not end with the last of the murders that the Ripper is traditionally credited with having committed. Cornwell looks well beyond the fall of 1888 to other unsolved murders in London, and in various parts of the country Sickert visited, in which the modus operandi points strongly to him.
-- The possibility of a Ripper who wore disguises and why this hasn’t been emphasized more or explored as a likely scenario, one that would help explain why the Ripper seemed to vanish without a trace after his crimes as well as the variety of descriptions witnesses gave of the men supposedly last seen with the victims. Cornwell also chronicles Sickert’s experiences as a stage actor and his familiarity with makeup and costumes. And she describes his lifelong notoriety for constantly changing his appearance with a variety of beards and mustaches, and for his bizarre dress that in some cases constituted costumes.
-- A look at the psychology of psychopathic personalities. “To begin to understand Jack the Ripper one must understand psychopaths,” writes Cornwell. “And to understand is not necessarily to accept. What these people do is foreign to every fantasy and feeling most of us have ever experienced. All people have the capacity for evil, but psychopaths are not like all of us.”
-- An account of Sickert’s childhood. Growing up under a mean-spirited father and a doting mother, Sickert’s coldness and self-absorption was obvious at a young age. Cornwell describes how the young Sickert used manipulation, deception and charm to firmly establish himself as the leader of his siblings and take control of his surroundings.
-- The secret that quite possibly devastated Sickert’s psyche: he was born with a deformity of his penis requiring three surgeries by the time he was five years old that would have left him disfigured if not mutilated. Cornwell writes, “He probably was incapable of an erection. He may not have had enough of a penis left for penetration, and it is quite possible he had to squat like a woman to urinate.” Cornwell describes the nightmarish medical procedures Sickert was forced to endure and reflects on the impact they might have had on the young boy. She also explores the ways in which women might have served as a dangerous reminder of his infuriating and humiliating abnormality.
-- A detailed analysis of Sickert’s paintings and sketches. From his earliest boyhood drawings, depicting women being abducted, tied up, and stabbed, to his music hall sketches featuring dismembered female body parts, to his later works including Ennui, his Camden Town Murder series, and Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, Cornwell explores the images of morbidity, violence, and a hatred of women that seem to pervade Sickert’s art.
-- A meticulous study of the content of the approximately 250 surviving Ripper letters. Although generations have been misled to think these were pranks, or the work of journalists bent on creating a sensational story, or the drivel of lunatics, Cornwell builds a convincing case that the Ripper himself wrote most of them. “Even when [Sickert’s] skilled artist’s hand altered his writing, his arrogance and language cannot help but assert themselves,” writes Cornwell. “Handwriting is easy to disguise, especially if one is a brilliant artist, but the unique and repeated use of linguistic combinations in multiple texts is the fingerprint of a person’s mind.” Cornwell also details the extent to which the evidence in the Ripper letters corresponds to Sickert’s personal and professional life.
-- An exhaustive analysis of the stylistic details in the Ripper letters. Cornwell reveals that the pages from these letters were painted and not written in ink, and the sketches many of them contained are professional and consistent with Walter Sickert’s artwork and technique. She writes, “One of the most distinctive features of the Ripper letters is that so many of them were written with drawing pens and daubed or smeared with bright inks and paints. They show the skilled hand of a highly trained or professional artist.”
-- What handwriting analysts learned about the similarities between the quirks and the position of the Ripper’s hand when he wrote his violent letters; the extent to which these quirks and peculiarities can be found in other Ripper writings that are disguised; and the ways in which these same quirks and hand positions lurk in Sickert’s erratic handwriting.
-- A new look at the Ripper’s gamesmanship, which surfaced in the murders themselves as well as in the clues and taunts he sent to the police and the press. “From 1888 to the present day,” writes Cornwell, “the millions of people who have associated Jack the Ripper with mystery and murder undoubtedly have no clue that more than anything else, this infamous killer was a mocking, arrogant, spiteful, and sarcastic man who believed virtually everyone on earth was an ‘idiot’ or a ‘fool.’ The Ripper hated the police, he loathed ‘filthy whores,’ and he was maniacal in his sarcastic, ‘funny little’ communications with those desperate to catch him.”
-- Details of Sickert’s preoccupation with London’s dark, seamy, underside. Cornwell examines the artists’ lifelong custom of renting at least three secret studios at a time, often scattered in the seediest sections of town. She explores his habit of vanishing for days or weeks on end with no explanation to friends or family of where he was or why. She charts his frequent outings to the most vulgar of London’s music halls. And she examines his penchant for wandering the streets late at night and into the early morning hours after the theaters let out.
-- A look at various conspiracy theories surrounding the Ripper murders and why Cornwell is convinced there was no cover-up. She writes, “No matter how badly the Metropolitan Police may have botched the Ripper investigation, there was no deliberate mendacity or disinformation that I could find. The boring fact is that most of what went wrong was due to sheer ignorance. Jack the Ripper was a modern killer born a hundred years too soon to be caught.”
-- The history of Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police, an organization with a Criminal Investigation Division that was a mere ten years old when Jack the Ripper began terrorizing London. Cornwell explains why Scotland Yard was completely unprepared for a serial killer like the Ripper.
-- Profiles of key law enforcement figures in the Ripper case including Frederick Abberline, an open-minded and experienced Metropolitan Police veteran, City of London Police Commissioner Henry Smith, and Sir Melville Macnaughton, who became assistant commissioner of CID a year after the most infamous of the Ripper murders and whose background consisted solely of having spent twelve years working on his family’s tea plantation in India. Cornwell describes the permanent damage Smith and Macnaughton inflicted on the Ripper investigation in the form of baseless self-promoting theories that became widely accepted.

Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed concludes with a look at how Sickert’s fractured pieces and personas seemed to spiral out of control a decade after his 1888 slaughter binge as he withdrew across the English Channel to France and Italy to live very much like the paupers he terrorized. Cornwell writes, “Psychopathic killers can sink into morbid depression after murderous sprees, and for one who had exercised seemingly perfect control, Sickert may have found himself completely out of control and with nothing left of his life. …By the time [he] was fifty, he had begun to self-destruct like an overloaded circuit without a breaker.” She describes Sickert’s unusual second marriage to one of his art students, his return to London at the start of World War I to begin a period of artistic productivity that would bring him great fame, and the bizarre circumstances surrounding the death and burial of his second wife.

With her knowledge of criminal investigation and her consummate skills as a bestselling writer, Patricia Cornwell has produced a book that is as compelling as it is authentic and pays due respect to the people whose early deaths spawned one of the twentieth century's least attractive entertainment industries. Portrait of a Killer is also a subtle tribute to the men and women who conduct modern forensic investigations and the technology they use. “When it’s all said and done,” says Cornwell, “the point of all this is to take what we know and apply it to the living.”