case closed by Patricia Cornwell

[Suzi]

Oh patricia won't put me off. And thanks for the good luck. I'd post the link somewhere on here when I'm done except for the fact it's Alternate Universe but it has gotten me interested in writing a fictional story for the hell of it.

A fictional story 'From Hell'- nice one!!!- Stick a link under Books or something!

[Fictionnaire]

I won't call it From Hell since there's a Jack The Ripper movie of that same name with Johnny Depp

[Suzi]

Joke! There's a LOT of things with that monicker- including a fine suspect based Ripper book!

[dmcdonald@onwight.net]

The Prince His Tutor and the Ripper

oh I got it muddled up then. I was looking through one of those library computer catalogues without my glasses. I thought I saw another one written by Patricia. Sorry.

Hi

I am glad to see that Mike Covell has put you right about my book and Ms Cornwell's! There are many Ripper books I would not mind being muddled up with but not that one! I wish mine had sold as well though!!

Anyway hope you can get hold of a copy of mine and read it if you are interested in the truth about the Royal connection. Sorry no mad theories here.

Regards
Deborah McDonald

[Fictionnaire]

I hope you didn't take offence to my words. Seems the consensus that the book is not good. Your book is on my list to read. Though personally, I don't believe in the royal conspiracy... But my mind isn't made up

[Gman992]

What's interesting is that Patricia totally dismisses the profile from all of the FBI agents that she knows and converses with. They are 180 degrees diffferent from what she writes about it. But, then again, they actually track down serial killers and she writes about them. And most of them are about the letters and paintings. The probably with paintings is that you can see in your mind what other people tell you to see. And the notion that Walter painted Jack the Ripper's bedroom? That's based on an old story just like the story of the novel The Lodger was written....the quiet man upset kept weird hourse---eureka---he must be Jack the Ripper! All hearsay...

[Jonathan H]

I have not got her book 'Case Closed' in my home but as I remember it -- and I stand corrected in advance by anybody if I am misremembering -- but I believe that Cornwall's research was so, eh. patchy that one of the chapters effusively praises Abberline -- yet is completely ignorant of his 1903 interview in which he plumped for Chapman as the Ripper.

[John Wheat]

I'm with Gman992 Cornwell is an ill informed crime writer. Although profiling is never 100% accurate it shouldn't be totally dismissed. If you look at the case sensibly it's highly unlikely that Sickert was the Ripper.

[TomTomKent]

I didn't like the book. It spent way too much time saying "Sickert painted things only the Ripper could have known!" Then went on to prove this by talking about all the other people who knew about it. Which suggested to me that Sickert knew things only the Ripper (or anybody who read a newspaper) could know...

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

I agree with you. I also read the book but I have no idea how she really got to Walter Sickert. I think this is something that will never be solved. Although it is interesting trying to figure it all out.

She got to it via a hoax perpetrated by Joseph Gorman, based on a story published by Osbert Sitwell in 1947 and developed by Donald McCormick in 1962.

Stephen Knight, who himself developed Gorman's hoax, mentioned Sitwell's tale as if it were just a curious coincidence, but it must have been the seed of Gorman's hoax because he borrowed from other elements of Mccormick's own hoax.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

The more you look at Cornwell's claims, the more holes appear in them.

For example, she appears to accuse Sickert of the murder of Caroline Winter, near Newcastle, in August 1889, at a time when Sickert appears to have been living in France, and in the very month in which he travelled to Paris to meet Degas and Gauguin.

[mpriestnall]

I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that S.Y. supplied to both Knight and Cornwell the hint that Sickert might have been JTR.

If so, that's an interesting co-incidence.

I believe Sickert may have just known of JTR's identity and the whole idea as Sickert being JTR just snowballed from there.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

Why would Scotland Yard ever have suspected Sickert of having been the murderer?

If they had, then he would have been able to produce alibis for at least some, and probably most, of the murders.

How could Sickert have known the murderer's identity?

He could have suspected someone, but the best evidence we have is that he was not even in London when most of the murders took place.