Not the Ripper

ANOTHER ONE bites the dust. The theory -- most prominently advanced by crime novelist Patricia Cornwell in her 2002 book "Portrait of a Killer" -- that the English painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper, serial murderer of prostitutes in Victorian London, appears to have been conclusively demolished. In a withering postscript to "Walter Sickert: A Life" (HarperCollins), just published in Britain, biographer Matthew Sturgis rebuts Cornwell's evidence one item at a time.

Sickert is certainly a seductive candidate for the Ripper role. An evasive, protean man, with a taste for squalor and a habit of skulking around London's East End, he took a keen interest in the Ripper murders. He painted a series of crepuscular Ripper-themed works, including one titled "Jack the Ripper's Bedroom," and liked to spook his models by wearing a red Ripper scarf. And Cornwell established, at vast expense, a far-from-conclusive DNA link between Sickert and one or two letters allegedly written by the Ripper.

The twin pillars of her argument however, were psychological and circumstantial. Sickert, in her rendering, was a bohemian psychopath born with a genital fistula "requiring surgeries when he was a toddler that would have left him disfigured if not mutilated" (and driven to murder as a consequence). Additionally, she claimed that it couldn't be proved that Sickert was not in London in August 1888, when the Ripper was at the bloody peak of his activities.

In his postscript, however, Sturgis quietly produces evidence that those childhood "surgeries" were not, in fact, for a genital fistula, and that far from stalking the gaslit alleys in August 1888, Sickert was holidaying in France with his mother. So Sickert passes into the realm of purely fantastical Ripperology, where he will dwell alongside fellow "suspects" Prince Albert and Lewis Carroll.

Lewis Carroll? Oh yes. In 1996 author Richard Wallace "decoded" various Carroll works to reveal the Ripper confessions anagrammatically buried therein. "Did gyre and gimble in the wabe/All mimsy were the borogoves," for example, becomes (in the Wallace version) "With hand-sword I slay the evil gender/A slimey theme; borrow gloves...." Well, it's a theory.