How Ripperology Works

The unsolved murder spree of Jack the Ripper has captivated generations of amateur investigators, each with their own theory of the killer's identity. Learn more about one particularly thought-provoking suspect in this HowStuffWorks podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know
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to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, as staff writer here
at how Stuff Works dot Com. With me is my trust,

(00:20):
the edit, Tricks, the Intrepid, Candice Gifts and how are
you Candidas? Well, I hope you are feeling intrepid right now.
We're about to enter some grizzly territory. Let's talk about
Jack the Ripper, shall we? Indeed? Okay, so specifically, could
Jack the Ripper have been an artist? Ah the artists
formerly known as Jack the Ripper a k a. One
Walter Sickert, a British impressionist painter. He would have been

(00:44):
twenty eight around the time of the famous Ripper murders,
also called the Canonical murders. These take place back from
August thirty one November nine, just as had the scene
for you, and it would have been more than just
doves crying and that dank and depraved east end of
line done in the Whitechapel District. It would have been
the sound of prostitutes. Um More specifically, his prey of

(01:05):
choice was the alcoholic, drunk, middle aged and unattractive prostitutes.
It's the unattractive part that really gets you, you know.
I mean, it's bad enough as it is, but unattractive
to the problem is is Jack the Ripper was never caught,
and as such, a kind of field of amateur investigation

(01:26):
called ripparology has grown up over the centuries um of
people who dedicate their time trying to figure out who
Jack the Ripper was, right, right, right, And over the
years police departments in London to have fingered about a
hundred seventy suspects in the case, but no one's ever
been definitively convicted of the crime. And back in two

(01:47):
thousand two, someone who wasn't even a real ripparologist sort
of took a stab at the case, no pun intended,
and that was crime novelist Patricia Cornwell. And she was
the one who named Walter Sickert. And she had you know, um,
hard evidence and some sort of I don't know, loosely
based evidence, and the loosely based evidence was sort of
relevant to her to her interpretation of Secrets art. Now actually, um, yeah,

(02:12):
she considered some of Secrets paintings confessional, like he had
actually painted, um or used the murdered prostitutes that he
murdered as models for some of his paintings, and that
that um, he was either tawning police or getting this
off his chest through these paintings, or he could have
been super authentic because he was taught under the school

(02:33):
of American painter James Whistler, who recommended that secret paint
from life. So, um, if you wanted to paint dead
prostitutes only made sense. Awesome first, what better way to
do it than? Yeah than that? Now? Actually, in a
nine FBI psychological profile of Jack the Ripper, um, one
of the one of the points they concluded was that
the Ripper probably would have um either gotten some of

(02:57):
his rage out in between murders by drawing pictures of
brutalized women, are writing, you know, fantasy stories about brutalizing women,
so sicker kind of fits that bill. But really, one
of the problems with basing your theory on art is
that artists so widely open to interpretation, especially impressionism. Yeah,
and that's what's kind of wild about this point of

(03:18):
Cornwell's argument. The painting that she was using as her
most damning evidence was called the camed in Town Murder,
and this featured a man sitting on the edge of
a bed and while he's dressed, there's a woman in
bed whose neket and ostensibly dead, and she was saying, look, look,
this is it, y'all. This is the ultimate tantamount confession.
But another critic pointed out that the painting has an

(03:39):
alternate title, and that is what shall we do for rent? Right?
So the the murderer and murdered woman go uh to
a desperate couple down on their luck, just with the
change of the time, right right, very here, scu a tonue.
She she didn't base her theory entirely on her interpretation

(03:59):
of secrets, though she actually um with her vast millions
um purchased some paintings to try to find clues and
actually tore one apart, which the curator of the Royal
Academy in London later called monstrously stupid publicly um that action.
But she also had some hard evidence. Yeah, she has
an empty DNA in her bag, mitchondrial DNA and the

(04:23):
glitch with this is that monicondrial DNA only comes from
our mother's lineage, so it's discounting your your father's and
put into you essentially, So using that to confirm the
identity of someone is only half right. It's and it
turns out it left about fifty thou people in London
at that time it could have produced a match. Strangely though,
one of them was Walter Sicker. And the way she

(04:44):
found a match was she compared um some secrets DNA
with DNA samples taken from the Ripper letters. Now, from
the time of the murders till about nineteen sixty, hundreds
of letters came in ostensibly written by Jack the Ripper. Um.
Most ripperologists don't think he out any of them. But um,
she Cornwell found that Secret had written one or two

(05:06):
of them. Uh. Now she kind of jumped to a
conclusion saying that you know, in her opinion that meant
he was the Ripper. But uh a ripperologist, um kind
of put it into perspective. Thanking Cornwell for all of
her hard work and research improving that Walter Secret was
indeed one of the people who wrote fraudulent Jack the
Ripper letters so well, that was rather tongue in chic

(05:27):
and if you want to learn more about this case,
there's so much more to learn. Check out Could Jack
the Ripper have been an artist? On how stuff works
dot com? For more on this and thousands of other topics.
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(05:49):
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