Rating: 
Summary: Poorly reasoned, poorly written
Review: Cornwell's attempt to prove painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper left me not only unconvinced, but confused. Her book is full of irrelevant digressions and unfounded assumptions. A good editor should have helped Cornwell better focus her ideas. (Perhaps an editor tried, and Cornwell's baffling book is the result.) Cornwll flits from one subject to another every few pages, rarely stating a hypothesis, offering supporting evidence and reaching a conclusion. She offers far too many "could haves" and ignores or dismisses any evidence that doesn't support her ideas. Writers far better than I (Stephen P. Ryder or Wolf Vanderlinden) have articulated the many problems with Cornwell's hypothesis. Find their articles online and read their analyses.
Rating: 
Summary: Still not convinced!
Review: One thing that Cornwell has in her favor is that she is qualified to investigate the evidence forensically. I think she does make the following points:
1.) Sickert no doubt did write most if not all of the Ripper letters based on paper, ink, and watermark evidence, as well as the DNA evidence discovered. But why not prove it by exhuming Sickert's mother and comparing DNA? 2.) The police COMMISIONER, not the general force, was incompetent. Surely no policeman worthy of the title would destroy evidence as he did twice, once with the bloody trousers and once with the message in chalk which he wouldn't even allow to be photographed. I suspect he got his job based on who he was as opposed to whether or not he was the best man for the job. 3.) The Ripper was NOT left-handed. If anybody would think a moment, this man had to disappear into the night, once within a few minutes of the police arriving on the scene. Could he have done this if he were covered in blood? i.e. worked from the front, left-handed? No. He worked from behind, right-handed, well out of the way of the spurting blood. Now as to objections. Cornwell would have us discount handwriting analysis. To a person who learned in high school the fine art of forgery, this is laughable. I soon learned that a note signed with my mother's signature also had to match her handwriting and even her eighth-grade education's misspellings and grammer. Since this did not always fool the office personal who signed the excuses, I learned to forge their names and comments. There was a lot of difference between Mr. Henry's elegant writing and Mr. Earp's heavy handed pen; between Mr. Sullivan's schoolastic writing and Coach Crowder's chicken scratching. I also needed offical paper which I obtainted by misdirection. I said that to say this. The letters of the Ripper have distinctive "p"s, and "r"s. Also when writing the word "the" the "h" was often crossed instead of the "t" or they both were crossed. This also shows up in the letter signed "Mathematicius".
Also the signature "Jack the Ripper" was often written left-handed which left another distinctive trait: an unclosed "a" which looks like a "u". Dispite the attempt at disguise, the familiar "p"s are still there. Does this prove Sickert's guilt? Not hardly. Just that he enjoyed deviling the police. Was he the Ripper? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But by definition of a serial killer, Martha Talbert was not the first and Mary Kelly not the last unless the Ripper died shortly after. They kill early in life and continue to do so until caught. Bottom line, Cornwell, you need more evidence.
Rating:
Summary: Rediculous Assertions
Review: I'm not a forensics specialist, but I do have an inquiring mind and this book is one of the worse written books I have ever read. There is no organization to this work and Cornwell takes off on tangents that I believe she thought were pertinent to the case of the "Jack the Ripper" murders. Those tangents offered very little to this opinionated and arrogant work. The first 1/4 of the book could be called "The Life and Times of Walter Sickert". She goes into every little detail about his life and spends an incredible amount of time on his genital problems. Granted, serial killers often have some sort of problem. Often the problem is sexual in nature, but later between pages 80 to 90, she tells the reader that she "can't say for sure" or "I can't state as a fact..." of what type of genital deformity he had, although she does list two possibilities. Cornwell couldn't say what type of surgery he received or whether anesthesia was used. In Chapter 11, pages 147 and 148, Cornwell goes so far to try to connect two of Sickerts paintings: "Two Studies of a Venetian Woman's Head" and "Nuit d' Ete'", to the Mary Ann Nichols murder because Nichols was murdered on a Summer night. "Nuit d' Ete'" means "summer night". How can I take this book seriously when Cornwell makes such rediculous assertions? How can I take this book seriously when she tells her literary agent, Esther Newberg, that she doesn't want to finish the book and the following dialogue is recorded? "'Well, you know,' she said very calmly as she resumed her pace. 'you don't have to do it. I can get you out of it.'
She could have gotten me out of it, but I could never have gotten myself out of it. I knew the identity of a murderer and I couldn't possibly avert my gaze. 'I am suddenly in position of judgment,' I told Ester. 'It doesn't matter if he's dead. Every now and then this small voice asks me, what if you're wrong? I would never forgive myself for saying such a thing about somebody, and then finding out I'm wrong.'
'But you don't believe you're wrong...'
'No. Because I'm not.' I said." (Chapter 2, pages 10 and 11) The above dialogue made me want to gag. Cornwell has made it clear who she believes is "Jack". On pages 15 and 16, she discusses the "stamp" DNA evidence. I may be wrong, but if the sample is still useful, why can't they take the DNA and match it to Sickert's mother through mitochondrial DNA? Cornwell asserts that; "The best result came from a 'Ripper' letter that yielded a single-donor mitochrondrial DNA sequence, specific enough to eliminate 99% of the population as the person who licked and touched the adhesive backing of that stamp."
Cornwell asserts that the Sickert Trust has no authority over the bodies of Sickert's family and the authorities know where Sickert's mother and sister are buried. That would clear or convict one of the suspects. I have one other problem with the book and that is Cornwell's insistance that the police of that period were incompetent or ignorant. That is insulting to the police who, if Cornwell would check her history, had just developed several procedures that are common place in today's forensic research. Those procedures were not widely known or used. If Cornwell wishes to reopen the investigation, great, but not to throw rocks in glass houses. She might begin by reorganizing her book into a readable format, because this book reads like the 1st draft of an English paper that was turned in as the final draft.
Rating:
Summary: The jury is still out
Review: Where's the hard evidence? What little "evidence" Cornwell offered was circumstantial, coincidental, twisted, and misinterpreted. She never once had me convinced that Sickert and Jack the Ripper were one and the same. She only convinced me that Sickert was mentally unstable, and that the Ripper committed more crimes than he is credited for. Sometimes I started thinking of Sickert and the Ripper as interchangeable, but only because Cornwell authored her book in such a way. Sometimes she wrote about the Ripper being a famous artist, or Sickert being a psychopathic killer. It was very difficult to follow the story the way she wrote it. Kind of like my review, it was very disjointed. When she did happen to mention some of her "evidence" she wouldn't go into detail about what she found. She only said something like "this evidence provides compelling proof that Sickert was the killer!" But she never explains why or how. I did enjoy the book, as many other reviewers have said, as a tale of London's East End during the late 19th century, and as a bit of trivia about Walter Sickert and Jack the Ripper. I learned new things about the old case, such as the hundreds of Ripper letters that were written to the police. This aspect of the book was very interesting and well done. My final verdict: It has its good points, but each scene becomes more dramatic until the reader becomes annoyed and wishes the publisher had kaboshed the whole thing.
Rating:
Summary: Ummm....Case Still Open
Review: Are you obsessively interested in the life, work and anatomy of Walter Sickert? If so, this is the book for you. Chock full of psychobabble, purest conjecture and self-congratulation, this analysis of a possible candidate for Jack the Ripper manages to make perhaps the most famous series of brutal unsolved crimes in history positively soporific. If you're interested in Jack the Ripper, there are lots of very good books actually about the killings, the investigation and the many possible suspects. Go pick one of them instead.
Rating:
Summary: Not quite!
Review: I have been interested in the Jack the Ripper case for some time, so I was anxious to read this book. It just wasn't as good as I had hoped. I had never heard of Sickert before I read this book, so I had no preconceived notions. I have no trouble believing that he wrote many of the Ripper letters and that he was mentally unstable. Patricia Cornwell almost had me believing that he might be Jack the Ripper. I was startled and confused by the abrupt end of the book. I was expecting her to tie up all the evidence in a nice neat package and she just stopped at the funeral of Sickert's second wife. I needed more to convince me. I was disappointed, as the other readers, at the way Cornwell skipped around. At one point I had to turn back several chapters to see if I was confused about a date. I still am not sure!
Rating:
Summary: 3 stars for effort, zero for credibility
Review: I tried to read this book, but found it to be very 1 sided(which comes to be expected with JTR single-suspect type books). I think that she did a very good job with her research, but it just wasn't enough. I believe that maybe the only point Cornwell made was that Walter Sickert was probably the author of many of the Ripper Letters... in fact, the DNA evidence she wrote about proved this, but everyone who knows a little about JTR knows that the killer may not have written any of those letters, and they were all written by different people. It was a good try, and Portrait is a very well authored book on a very popular theory, but its just not good enough to convince most ripperologists. I would recommend at least skimming through this for anyone interested in the Ripper murders, because Cornwell does touch on a few good points, but I would also recommend checking out some other works. I would recommend that maybe you invest in a nice ripper encyclopedia, such as Phillip Sugden's "The Complete History of Jack the Ripper" and/or Paul Begg, Martin Fido, and Keith Skinner's "Jack the Ripper A-Z." I would also recommend the on-line casebook, which includes info on every single JTR suspect, witness, and victim. It also includes articles transcribed from several old newspapers and magazines, oficial documents, and almost everything else. I'm not supposed to put in urls, so I'll just recommend you do a search for "Casebook: Jack the Ripper" on any online search engine. If you are intrested in Sickert as a suspect, you should certainly check out Cornwell's book, but definitely also check out those other materials.
Rating: 
Summary: Be prepared for the gruesome
Review: Portrait of a Killer, Jack the Ripper Case Closed. It sounds like a Victorian Thriller, and coming from well known mystery author Patricia Cornwell, one might expect it to be one. What it is, however, is an extremely well researched study of an artist, Walter Sickert, whom the author believes to have been the Whitechapel serial killer, Jack the Ripper. It comes close to the "more than I wanted to know" category at times, but the detailed discussion of what is known of the victims' lives and last activities is a poignant social description. The manner of their deaths seems to add insult to injury, and probably seemed as much to the socially conscious of the time. The author herself suggests that the miserable conditions of the slums of London came into the limelight in a way that they never had before, bringing them to the attention of the public and perhaps paving the way for social change that gathered momentum in the early twentieth century. The story is a chilling review of the evidence from the police, public document, newspaper, and family files of the period and an application of modern forensics techniques to them. As the author states, there is no statute of limitations on murder, and although all of the characters involved in the drama are long dead-most over a hundred years dead-there is still a fascination with the macabre behavior of the killer. Modern audiences are familiar with the subject of serial killers, which seem to have cropped up from time to time throughout the past century to fill our newspapers with the senseless violence that seems almost the hallmark of our age. When one reads this book, one will discover that barbarity to ones fellow human being is by no means confined to our own disturbed culture. The Ripper was never brought to trial, and Cornwell believes that many of his crimes were not even credited to him, including some of the more vicious crimes perpetrated against children and others in outlying areas of England. At the beginning of the book, Cornwell admits to a feeling of discomfort with the evil of both the Ripper and unbalanced mental state of the artist. It's obvious that she herself is convinced of his guilt. The chapters start out organized, the discussion of the artist's early life and family providing structure. The deaths of the victims also provide a framework. By the middle of the book, however, the author seems to wander a bit. She jumps from date to date, describing a variety of events that interweave with the Ripper murders, and by the end of the book, the story just stops. It ends with the artist's strange behavior at the funeral of his second wife in the 1920's, this despite the fact that Sickert himself lived until 1942 and married a third time. It's almost as if the villainy of the Sickert character in his purposed guise of Jack the Ripper has freaked out the author, and she can barely tolerate dealing with either of them. It bespeaks of an unpleasant experience and certainly gives credence to the idea that there really is a devil and some people can in fact be evil in a deep and spiritual sense. It also suggests that Cornwell herself is an incredibly creative and imaginative person for whom writing is more than just a vocation. While I think that Cornwell makes a good case for the guilt of the disdurbed artist Sickert, I'm not certain but that that fact arises at least as much from her ability to weave a good story and to create an ambiance of mystery around her characters as it does from the facts in her case. That the man was deeply disturbed, possibly due to childhood traumas and to a highly disfunctional family, seems quite likely. It's not impossible that the man was either autistic or even schizophrenic. That he was Jack the Ripper, I'm not so sure. Probably the most damning physical evidence is the stationary used by both the artist and Jack the Ripper in their correspondence, but as Ms Cornwell herself points out, even if the artist had written the letters to the police, it demonstrates more his rather bent sense of humor than his guilt. I also find it interesting that there appear to be no descendants to be offended by a book damning their ancestor as one of the nineteenth century's most vicious killers! There is an element of legal safety in that. A fascinating book, but be prepared for the gruesome.
Rating:
Summary: The use of language
Review: I admit that I am not nomally a fan of true crime books, and that I have never read any of Patricia Cornwell's books before. I do, however, have a degree in English. As for the theory itself, I feel that Ms. Cornwell makes a decent arguement. There is a lack of evidence, which is to be expected when the crimes were commited so long ago and the evidence was not all kept by the authorities. My biggest problems with this book come from the format and the use of language. Ms. Cornwell skips around so much in the way she tells the story that you easily loose track of the names, dates, and events themselves. I found it dificult to keep it all straight. If it were written in more of a time-line format, it would have been much easier to follow.
Overall, the story is lost in the poor writing. Whether read for enjoyment, or historical interest, you are best to have a pen and paper handy if you want to make any sense of what you read.
Rating:
Summary: Cornwell needed an editor with a big, sharp knife
Review: That letters written by Sickert and Jack the Ripper came from the same batch of stationery, and a batch of only 24 sheets, is Cornwell's best evidence--and pretty good evidence, at that. But you could easily miss that skimming through because nobody's going to read this book word for word. Do we really need every speculation that's ever crossed her mind about what a sicky Sickert is? I guess she couldn't get permission to reproduce the paintings of mutilated women which support her argument. Instead we get several photos of Sickert which "show his many faces"--Not. Frankly, he looks intelligent and kindly and not a bulgy-eyed maniac like, say, Ted Bundy. My suggestion for further research: get Don Foster to do a professional comparison of Sickert's and Jack the Ripper's language and publish an article about it rather than a book.
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