Jack the Ripper Is Coming to Harvard

Crime writer and forensics expert Patricia Cornwell claims that she has found Jack the Ripper—and now she’s bringing him to the Fogg.

For the past half-decade, Cornwell has been investigating the true identity of Jack the Ripper, the legendary criminal who gruesomely killed five prostitutes in Whitechapel, England in 1888. She has pledged 82 works by Impressionist artist Walter Sickert, whom she claims was the real “Jack the Ripper,” to Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum.

The 82 works include 24 paintings, 36 prints, and 22 drawings by Sickert, who was born in England in 1860 and was a pupil of James McNeill Whistler and Edgar Degas.

“I wanted to find the very best museum who could handle this artwork and could also be scientific,” she said in an interview last week.

A FOGGY PAST

Cornwell worked with conservators at the Fogg after the publication of her 2002 book “Portrait of a Killer,” which identified Sickert as the Whitechapel murderer. She traveled to London with Fogg scientists, who assisted the author as she compared Sickert’s correspondence to letters allegedly written by Jack the Ripper.

That research later continued at Harvard. Cornwell gave the center a forensic device, called a video spectral comparator, that allows scholars to compare handwriting and paper watermarks. She found that the paper of three letters written by Sickerts has the same watermarks and measurements as paper Jack the Ripper used for some of his letters. She said that only 24 sheets of this type of paper exist.

She added that while the handwriting of Jack the Ripper is disguised and is different from Sickert’s handwriting, the composition of certain characters in the two letters seems remarkably similar.

FACT OR FICTION?

Cornwell first became interested in this mystery in 2001 when she had a conversation with a Scotland Yard investigator in London about Jack the Ripper. As she researched Sickert’s work, she became more and more disturbed by his live subjects’ “dead” appearance and his other paintings of actual murder scenes.

“Some of these sitters look dead. There’s something violent,” she said.

Cornwell added that Sickert was “in the right place at the right time for these murders to have occurred,” and that he had a strange fascination with Jack the Ripper. At one point, he created a painting in which the murderer appeared in front of a backdrop of Sickert’s own bedroom.

Cornwell said that such “circumstantial” evidence, while not substantial enough to prove that Jack the Ripper and the artist are one and the same, is important when added to scientific evidence.

“It is a theory based on scientific, historical and biographical investigation,” she said.

But not everyone is convinced. Sickert’s biographer, Matthew Sturgis, has called Cornwell’s thesis “pure fiction.” He has mustered evidence to show that Sickert was probably in France—far away from the crime scene—during the murder spree.

The Fogg isn’t taking sides in the quarrel among historians over Jack the Ripper’s identity.

“It’s not for us to prove or disprove her theory,” said a spokesman for Harvard University Art Museums, Daron Manoogian. “As a research and conservation center we certainly thought it was an interesting project to take part in.”

Manoogian added that the Straus Center “wasn’t able to make any conclusions about her theory” after the project was completed.

The works on paper by Sickert will be available by appointment at the Fogg’s Agnes Mongan Center, but that there are currently no plans to exhibit the works. However, one painting by Sickert–“Portrait of Thérèse Lessore”–is currently on display in the Fogg.

As she gives the works by Sickert to Harvard, Cornwell isn’t giving up in her bid to establish a link between the artist and the killer. She hopes that DNA testing will provide her with further evidence to support her theory. “This isn’t over with yet,” she said.

-Staff writer Katherine M. Gray can be reached at kmgray@fas.harvard.edu.