Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed Read Online Free

Town Murder. I’ve always wondered about him.”
    It wasn’t the first time Sickert had been connected with Jack the Ripper’s crimes. Most people have always found the notion laughable.
    I began to wonder about Sickert when I was flipping through a book of his art. The first plate I landed on was an 1887 painting of the well-known Victorian performer Ada Lundberg at the Marylebone Music Hall. She is supposed to be singing but looks as if she is screaming as the leering, menacing men look on. I am sure there are artistic explanations for all of Sickert’s works. But what I see when I look at them is morbidity, violence, and a hatred of women. As I continued to follow Sickert and the Ripper, I began to see unsettling parallels. Some of his paintings bear a chilling resemblance to mortuary and scene photographs of Jack the Ripper’s victims.
    I noticed murky images of clothed men reflected in mirrors inside gloomy bedrooms where nude women sit on iron bedsteads. I saw impending violence and death. I saw a victim who had no reason to fear the charming, handsome man who had just coaxed her into a place and state of utter vulnerability. I saw a diabolically creative mind, and I saw evil. I began adding layer after layer of circumstantial evidence to the physical evidence discovered by modern forensic science and expert minds.
    All along, forensic scientists and I have hoped for DNA. But it would be almost a year and more than a hundred tests later before we would begin to see results—most of them poor—from the 75- to 114-year-old genetic evidence that Walter Sickert and Jack the Ripper may have left when they touched and licked postage stamps and envelope flaps. If it is true (and we can’t be certain) that Sickert and the Ripper left the DNA sequences we found, it was from cells inside their mouths that sloughed off into their saliva and were sealed in adhesive until DNA scientists recovered the genetic markers with tweezers, sterile water, and cotton swabs.
    The best result came from a Ripper letter that yielded a single-donor mitochondrial DNA sequence, specific enough to eliminate 99% of the population as the person who licked and touched the adhesive backing of that stamp. All the markers found in the single-donor profile were also present as components of mixtures found in another Ripper letter and two Walter Sickert letters, and other Sickert items, such as coveralls he wore when he painted. (This is neither surprising nor completely damning.) The DNA evidence is the oldest ever tested in a criminal case and is by no means conclusive. We can’t prove the source of any of the DNA because we don’t, at this time, have the mitochondrial DNA profiles of any of the individuals involved—most important, a clean profile of Walter Sickert.
    But we aren’t finished with our DNA testing and other types of forensic analyses. These could go on for years as the technology advances at an exponential rate and more evidence is found and examined. DNA testing completed since the initial release of this book not only has turned up more genetic components consistent with Sickert and Ripper letters, but remarkably has revealed a single-donor mitochondrial DNA sequence from a letter written by so-called Ripper suspect Montague John Druitt. The mitochondrial DNA sequence acquired from the stamp and envelope flap swabbed on a letter he wrote from Oxford University in 1876 shares no significant markers in common with the single-donor profile from the Openshaw letter written by Jack the Ripper.
    Assuming that it was Druitt’s mitochondrial DNA we recovered from his letter, and that the single-donor mitochondrial DNA recovered from the Openshaw letter was left by the Ripper, it can be argued that Montague Druitt, long considered by some to have been Jack the Ripper, at the very least did not pen this significant Ripper letter (which was also written on stationery that has the same watermark as one of the many types of stationery