Stuff You Should Know - How Ripperology Works

Episode Date: July 10, 2008

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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only I can see you. What you're doing is larger than yourself, almost like a religion. Like, he was a god. Listen to The Turning Room of Mirrors on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Brought to you by Consumer Guide Automotive. We make our buying easier. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, a staff writer here at HowStuffWorks.com. With me is my trusty, editrix, the Intrepid Candice Gibson. How are you, Candice? I'm fabulous, Josh. Well, I hope you are feeling intrepid right now. We're about to enter some grisly territory. Let's talk about Jack the Ripper, shall we? Indeed. Okay, so specifically,

could Jack the Ripper have been an artist? Ah, the artist formerly known as Jack the Ripper, aka one Walter Sickert, a British Impressionist painter. He would have been 28 around the time of the famous Ripper murders, also called the canonical murders. These took place back in 1888 from August 31st, November 9th, just to set the scene for you. And it would have been more than just doves crying in that dank and depraved east end of London in the Whitechapel district. It would have been the sound of prostitutes. More specifically, his prey of 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, too. Now, the problem is,

Jack the Ripper's never caught. And as such, a kind of field of amateur investigation called Ripperology has grown up over the centuries of people who dedicate their time trying to figure out who Jack the Ripper was, right? Right. And over the years, police departments in London, too, have fingered about 170 suspects in the case, but no one's ever been definitively convicted of the crime. And back in 2002, someone who wasn't even a real Ripperologist 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, some hard evidence and some sort of, I don't know, loosely based evidence. And the loosely based evidence was sort of relevant

to her interpretation of Sickert's art. Now, actually, yeah, she considered some of Sickert's paintings confessional, like he had actually painted or used the murdered prostitutes that he murdered as models for some of his paintings, and that he was either taunting police or getting this off his chest through these paintings. Well, he could have been super authentic, because he was taught under the school of American painter James Whistler, who recommended that Sickert paint from life. So if you wanted to paint dead prostitutes, it only made sense yet at all from first. What better way to do it than yeah, than that. Now, actually, in a 1988 FBI psychological profile of Jack the Ripper, one of the points they concluded was that

the Ripper probably would have either gotten some of his rage out in between murders by drawing pictures of brutalized women or writing, you know, fantasy stories about brutalizing women. So Sickert kind of fits that bill. But really, one of the problems with basing your theory on art is that art is so widely open to interpretation, especially impressionism. Yeah. And that's what's kind of wild about this point of Cornwell's argument. The painting that she was using as her most damning evidence was called the Camden 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 who's naked 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 alternate title, and that is, what shall we do for rent? Right. So the the murderer and murdered woman go to a desperate couple down on their luck, just with the change of the title. Right, right. Very kerosterotones. I'm such a critic. She didn't base her theory entirely on her interpretation of Sickert's art, though. She actually, with her vast millions, 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 that action. But she also had some hard evidence. Yeah, she has an empty DNA in her bag,

mitochondrial DNA. And the glitch with this is that mitochondrial DNA only comes from her mother's lineage. So it's discounting your your father's input into you, essentially. So using that to confirm the identity of someone is only half. Right. And it turns out it left about 50,000 people in London at that time who could have produced a match. Strangely, though, one of them was Walter Sickert. And the way she found a match was she compared some of Sickert's DNA with DNA samples taken from the Ripper letters. Now, from the time of the murders till about 1960, hundreds of letters came in ostensibly written by Jack the Ripper. Most Ripperologists don't think he wrote any of them. But she Cornwell found that Sickert had written one or two of them.

Now, she kind of jumped to a conclusion saying that, you know, in her opinion, that meant he was the Ripper. But a Ripperologist kind of put it into perspective thanking Cornwell for all of her hard work and research improving that Walter Sickert was indeed one of the people who wrote fraudulent Jack the Ripper letters. Well, that was rather tongue in cheek. 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 HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting?

Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil asset for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, The Turning, Room of Mirrors, we look beneath the delicate veneer of American Ballet and the culture formed by its most influential figure, George Ballinger. He used to say, what are you looking at dear? You can't see you, only I can see you. What you're doing is larger than yourself, almost like a religion. Like he was a god. Listen to The Turning, Room of Mirrors

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.