Jack The Ripper - Mark Whitehead [45]
Sickert’s body was cremated, leaving no DNA against which to check possible saliva on Ripper envelopes and stamps. On a positive note, the rumours that Cornwell cut up several of Sickert’s paintings searching for DNA samples are not borne out in the book. Some of Sickert’s own letters are tested but, as Cornwell ruefully points out, the gum could well have been wet with a sponge. A result on mitochondrial DNA reveals a connection between one of Sickert’s letters and one of the Ripper letters ‘specific enough to eliminate 99% of the population’. Sadly, she doesn’t mention the population of where, exactly. Perhaps this will be addressed in the proposed sequel.
For a more detailed dissection of Cornwell’s theory, we suggest that you try ‘Patricia Cornwell and Walter Sickert: A Primer’ by Stephen P Ryder on the inestimable Casebook website (see address below). Matthew Sturgis’s 2005 biography of Sickert (Walter Sickert:A Life) provides a more sober account of the artist’s life.
Joseph Barnett (1858–1926)
Fingered by Bruce Paley in Jack the Ripper – The Simple Truth (1996)
Mary Jane Kelly’s lover, Barnett, was the fourth of five children. His father, a fish porter, died when he was six. His mother appears to have deserted the family soon afterwards. Barnett was brought up by his elder brothers, Daniel and Denis, and his sister Catherine. It is believed that becoming an orphan caused Barnett’s speech defect, echolalia, which caused him to compulsively repeat the last few words of anything said to him.
Paley advances his theory cautiously but persuasively. He points out that, unlike most suspects, Barnett fits the description in the FBI profile. Barnett’s rationale for the killings is to stop Kelly continuing as a prostitute. His dislike of Kelly’s trade is certainly made clear in both his and others’ statements at Kelly’s inquest. Paley suggests that, after Kelly’s murder and the four-hour-long interrogation that Barnett underwent, he no longer had the motive or the nerve, to commit further murders.
Two other men in Mary Kelly’s life have been put forward as possible Rippers: John McCarthy, her landlord, and Joseph Fleming, her old lover. Fleming is suspected because of the possibility that a Joseph Fleming who died in 1920 at Claybury Mental Hospital was the same man.
James Kenneth Stephen (1859–92)
Fingered in Michael Harrison’s Clarence (1972), David Abrahamsen’s Murder and Madness: The Secret Life of Jack the Ripper (1992) and John Wilding’s Jack the Ripper Revealed (1993)
Prince Eddy’s tutor while at Cambridge, 1883, Stephen suffered a blow to the head in 1886 which would later cause brain damage and his subsequent death in 1892. A noted orator, Stephen never settled on one career, moving from don to journalist to lawyer. He returned to residence at Cambridge in 1890. There is no real evidence linking Stephen to the Ripper murders. Arguably, Harrison’s book names him merely because he was exonerating Prince Eddy and wanted to give his readers an alternative. He speculated that Eddy and Stephen became lovers while Eddy was at Cambridge. Once the relationship necessarily ceased, Stephen embarked on his murderous career, committing the crimes on dates that would taunt Eddy. Harrison notes signs of misogyny and sadism in Stephen’s poetry. Abrahamsen proposes that both Stephen and Eddy were the Ripper, clearly disagreeing with Harrison’s various alibis for Eddy. Wilding teams Stephen up with Druitt to no more convincing effect.
James Maybrick (1838–1889)
Fingered by his own ‘diary’ and Shirley Harrison in The Diary of Jack the Ripper (1993/1998)
A drug-addicted Liverpudlian cotton merchant, Maybrick hit the headlines after his death in 1889 when his wife Florence was arrested and tried for his murder. Maybrick had often used arsenic and toxins as stimulants and aphrodisiacs yet these facts were little considered during his wife’s trial. In one of many connections that the Ripper case seems to revel in, Florence Maybrick’s trial was presided over by Sir James Stephen, the father of JK Stephen. At that point Sir James