Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper -- Case Closed

Rating:
Summary: Is Jack the Ripper case really closed?
Review: I've been a fan of Patricia Cornwell for a long time. Kay Scarpetta is a really a great character for her novels.
This book was really different for her. It was hard to get into this novel. Unlike her others you knew it wasn't true but you read it anyway. I expected this novel to be somewhat in the same format as her others, knowing this was supposed to be somewhat factual.
Although Cornwell had many facts on this Sickert person alot of the evidence against him were circumstancial. This seems to be more of her theories than actual proof.
I somewhat liked this novel because the history was interesting, but disappointed because there's still doubt on whether he was the true "Jack the Ripper". I think there needs to be more investigating to be done. Maybe some day we'll find out, very doubtful though.
Thank you Patricia for a facinating theory. You are still one of my number one fan.

Rating:
Summary: A BIT CONFUSED
Review: I READ MY FIRST BOOK BY PATRICIA CORNWELL AND I HAV'T TO SAY THAT I WAS A BIT CONFUSED ABOUT WHERE THE AUTHOR WAS GOING. THE BOOK WAS WRITTEN WERE IT WOULD TAKE A POLICE DETECTIVE ; OR A FORENSIC SCIENTIST TO UNDERSTAND. I NOTICED THAT SHE KEPT REPEATING HERSELF WHEN IT CAME TO THE FORENSIC SCIENCE IN THE BOOK. SHE KEPT REPEATING OF WHAT WE COULD DO NOW, IF WE HAD THE EVIDENCE NOW THAT EXISTED BACK THEN. WELL THIS IS 2003 AND WE DON'T . SO I DON'T BELIEVE 100% THAT WALTER SICKERT WAS JACK THE RIPPER. CASE CLOSED!

Rating:
Summary: Case Closed? What Case?
Review: This is the only Patricia Cornwell novel -- Oops! Make that book -- that I have ever read. From everything I've heard (mainly from my mother, who is a big fan) her fictional novels are riveting and highly researched. I don't know that I shall ever be able to believe in her research, however, having read "Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper-Case Closed." Actually, I take that back, the research itself isn't the fault of the book, but rather, the author's reckless twisting of the facts to suit her hypothesis.

To decide based on similarities between letters signed Jack the Ripper and letters signed Walter Sickert, that Sickert was Jack the Ripper is a leap. The most that any of Cornwell's mitochondrial DNA evidence proves is that Sickert may have been one of many people who sent hoax letters. This seems in keeping with the Victorian public's fascination with the Ripper cases, and the many facts available in the tabloids at the time. Most other people who are Ripper experts believe that all but one Ripper letter was a hoax. Several people were actually brought to trial for writing these hoax letters, which Cornwell never mentions. Cornwell never proves that the Ripper letters were written by one person (Walter Sickert, of course) just that they really, really could have been, if you really stretch the facts, since an artist could disguise his handwriting, and spelling, etc. As for the watermarks found on the stationary, is it surprising that after digging through hundreds of Ripper letters and hundreds of Sickert letters that Cornwell would come up with similar watermarks from one of the largest stationary companies of the time?

She constantly points to similarities between Sickert paintings and mortuary photos. Surely the killer would be painting the subjects as he left them at the crime scene if he wanted a souvenir of the crime, not from mortuary photos that it is unlikely he ever saw. Cornwell's constant judgment of Sickert's paintings seems shallow and unimaginative. He painted macabre scenes (Cornwell's judgment, not mine.), thus he must have been a tormented psychopath. What tripe! How many other artists have painted disturbing paintings and never been accused of such crimes? Besides which, to prove her hypothesis, Cornwell has pulled a few painting completely out of the context of the bulk of the artist's corpus, a body of work which is highly sensitive, and in keeping with the Impressionistic tradition. I think that this reactionary thinking about art offended me more than anything else in the nov...-(there I go again) book. To find out that Cornwell actually cut up a Sickert painting in a quest for evidence struck me as mad and highly insensitive.

Nor did Ms. Cornwell ever convince me that Sickert was impotent or that he had a rage against women. She never found any evidence that Sickert had a fistula on his penis other than the hearsay of a nephew. She never shows any evidence of him treating women in a cruel or abusive way. He is portrayed rather as a wastrel and an adulterer (an impotent adulterer?)-geez, how many other artists could that be pinned too? Does that mean they all hated women and had the tendencies of serial killers?

My overall impression after reading this book was that Ms. Cornwell had an overactive imagination in some areas and too little imagination in others. Her twisting of the facts was evident about half way through the book when I came to the DNA evidence I was waiting for and nothing was proven. Case closed? I don't think so. And since Ms. Cornwell is staking her career on this case, I don't think I'll be interested in reading any of her other novels, err books.

Rating:
Summary: Case Closed? I Don't Think So.
Review: What a huge disappointment. Even after reading this book, I don't know how Cornwell can say, with confidence that Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. I've never read a Jack The Ripper book but I have seen a few documentaries on TV and I'm not convinced at all with Cornwell's conclusion. I think that when she wrote this book, she did so with blinders on. It seems that she was so focused on Sickert that there could be no other possibilities. I don't know that the Ripper identity will ever be solved, and it surely hasn't been with this book.

Rating:
Summary: Case not even close to closed
Review: Portrait of a killer is a poorly written book based on Patricia Cornwell's theory that Walter Sickert was the infamous killer, Jack the Ripper. I read the entire book waiting for the proof positive, but it never came.

The so called evidence that Cornwell puts forward is nothing more than poorly drawn conclusions based on similarities in Sickert's use of certain phrases in his correspondence and that of the Ripper in his taunting of the police. She also makes much of Sickert's style and subjects in his paintings.

This book was difficult to read because of its lack of a chronology of the murders, and because of its disjointed style.
Based on this book and Cornwell's "evidence", Walter Sickert is the least likely suspect I've come across.

Rating:
Summary: NOT BAD BUT NOT CONVINCING
Review: I have only read one Patricia Cornwell novel, so I'm not a fan. This was a very interesting book on Jack the Ripper and kept me turning the pages. I got it as a gift and thought, "Oh great, another Jack the Ripper book." You can only read about the same five murders so many times before you know the stories by heart. But this book actually had something new to say.

It interests me that PC could and would go back and reinvestigate the crimes. I thought the DNA off the Ripper stamps was an ingenious idea. However, although PC does a good job of making her case against the artist Walter Sickert, I would have to agree with People Magazine's review. All she's done is prove that Sickert probably authored some of the Ripper letters. Nice try, though. I thought John Douglas made a better case in THE CASES THAT HAUNT US in less than 100 pages.

Rating:
Summary: I expected much better of Cornwell...
Review: ARGHHHHHH.... It's so incredibly frustrating when someone who is known to be a good writer turns out such a tortuous and disconnected book as this one turned out to be. Cornwell obviously did the research, but the blasted book reads like a notebook of oddball notes she wrote to herself while doing the research, rather than in organized chapters presented in such a way as to make her case. She really should have known better than this.

That is not to say that the information is not interesting, or that she could have made the case after this many years that this guy (if you can call him that) actually was the Ripper. The information seems to be there...what was the problem? A chapter on this guy's background and family, a chapter on his possible medical problems and the agony that must have accompanied it. A chapter on his wife and her family, a chapter on his presence in London during those times. A chapter on the massive amount of writing he did, and the comparisons between his writing and the Ripper's writings. A chapter on the possible victims elsewhere in England, and speculation of grisly finds on the Continent. This type of order would have made this book so much better.

As it was, Cornwell seem to be writing in disassociated thought, which may be great for poetry, but is not a good methodology for history. Even if she was in a rush to get this book out before someone else, the publisher didn't bother to bring up the collosal disorganization of this book?

A mortifying disappointment...this book goes to the library.

Karen Sadler,
Science education

Rating:
Summary: Case closed...Indeed!
Review: Ms. Cornwell's enthusiasm for detail, whether fictional or non fictional, is readable and almost poetic. The descriptions from which she attempts to sidestep are gruesome...but so thorough, one forgets she wasn't the coroner.
Her case against Sickert is certainly one which should be continuously researched and considered. She convinced me!

Rating:
Summary: Not even CLOSE to "CLOSED"
Review: There are many good books about Saucy Jack; this is not one of them. Cornwell's book is so error-strewn that I felt I was reading one of her works of fiction, rather than a "factual" treatise on the Ripper. If you have the gross egotism to put "Case Closed" on the jacket, you'd better have more to offer than some of the flimsiest "evidence" I have ever seen for convicting one of history's most notorious killers. (By the way, I personally do not subscribe to the notion that "Jack" was one person; at least two of the deaths attributed to him are sufficiently different that they were almost certainly not his handiwork. But back to Cornwell.) It's hard to know where to begin with the catalogue of mistaken information in this tome. Cornwell does a good, if transpontine job describing Victorian London, and she has obviously done her homework on the decidedly unpleasant Walter Sickert. But the praise ends there. She repeats so many myths, inaccurately reports so many facts, conjectures so many events and conversations, that when she does try to present scientific evidence (DNA, watermarks, etc.) one is already too suspicious to lend credence to her theory. She can't even spell the name of of one of the victims correctly; she gullibly repeats the error on Catherine Eddowes' grave marker and omits the "e" (thus, Eddows) from her last name. (Every other document, including her death certificate and contemporary police and newspaper reports, spells it with an "e".) Other errors in simple fact abound, too many to list, but so easily identifiable that one senses that her "researchers" were laughing all the way to the bank. So, too, were her editors and proofreaders; this book is replete with spelling mistakes, syntactical and grammatical errors, and an overall sloppiness in construction that destroys any credibility the author was hoping to establish. ...

Rating:
Summary: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Review: This book was a Christmas present. By April, I had only made it halfway through. Why? I haven't been able to read more than three pages without falling into a nice, deep sleep.