Walter Sickert - Jack The Ripper

Jack The Ripper

Sickert took a keen interest in the crimes of Jack the Ripper and believed he had lodged in a room used by the infamous serial killer. He had been told this by his landlady, who suspected a previous lodger. Sickert did a painting of the room and titled it "Jack the Ripper's Bedroom." It shows a dark, melancholy room with most details obscured. This painting now resides in the Manchester City Art Gallery in Manchester.

Although for over 70 years there was no mention of Sickert's being a suspect in the Ripper crimes, in modern times three books have been published whose authors maintain that Sickert was Jack the Ripper or his accomplice.

• In 1976, Stephen Knight, in his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, maintained that Sickert had been forced to become an accomplice in the Ripper murders. Knight's information came from Joseph Gorman, who claimed to be Sickert's illegitimate son. Even though Gorman later admitted he had lied, Knight's book was responsible for a conspiracy theory that accuses royalty and freemasonry of complicity in the Ripper murders.
• In 1990, Jean Overton Fuller, in her book Sickert and the Ripper Crimes, maintained that Sickert was the killer.
• In 2002, crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, in Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, maintained that Sickert was Jack the Ripper. A psychological motivation for Sickert was said to be a congenital anomaly of his penis. Cornwell purchased 31 of Sickert's paintings, and some persons in the arts world have said that she destroyed one of them in a search for Sickert's DNA, but Cornwell denies having done this. Cornwell claimed she was able to scientifically prove that the DNA on a letter attributed to the Ripper and on a letter written by Sickert belong to only one percent of the population.

In 2004, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in its article on Sickert, dismissed as "fantasy" any claim that he was Jack the Ripper.