Much as we like the idea of Jill The Ripper, most of the more outrageous theories stick with the accepted idea that the murderer was a man. It usually is. Stupid men. One particularly stupid man may have been renowned painter Walter Sickert, who was a member of the avant-garde Camden Town Group in London during the 1800s. He may also have been Jack The Ripper, leaving behind a pretty compelling trail of clues that should probably have lead to a conviction. Maybe. We're not sure. That's what crime novelist Patricia Cornwell - very much the Conan Doyle of her day - reckons, to the point that she tore up a Sickert canvas to look for evidence of his involvement. It was an act of vandalism branded as monstrous stupidity but, dammit, she got results. Cornwell was working of an already-established theory of Sickert as The Ripper, with existing evidence of his being in the right place at the right time, living for a period in a flat believed to have previously belonged to old Jack, and producing a painting of it called "Jack the Ripper's Bedroom". Cromwell apparently gained enough DNA from messing with one of Sickert's other paintings to compare to one of those Ripper letters and prove they were one and the same, but we're not sure we buy it. Guy would've had to have been pretty cocky to live in the same house as the murderer, and then effectively paint a self-portrait, identifying himself as the culprit. Apparently he did it all because of his weird willy though, so, anything's possible?
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
