After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Who was Jack the Ripper? The Artist (Suspect 3)

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

Part 3/4. By looking at the men accused of being Jack the Ripper, we uncover dark truths about Victorian society - and our own. Why were these men, most of them almost certainly innocent, singled out as monsters?Today Anthony Delaney tells Maddy Pelling about how the celebrated artist Walter Sickert became a leading suspect for many. His art is unsettling, gruesome even, but does that make him a murderer?Written by Anthony Delaney. Edited by Tomos Delargy. Produced by Freddy Chick and Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AFTERDARKYou can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

I'm looking at a painting. It's an oil painting on canvas and it was completed sometime between 1906 and 1907. I'm straining my eyes because, to be quite frank, I'm not entirely sure what it is I'm looking at. The longer I look, however, the more it comes into focus. It's a bedroom, glimpsed from a hallway through an open door. It is darkly lit. It's oppressive, actually. I see a large window, through which blades of light intrude. There is some decent middle class 19th century furniture discernible too. A dressing table, a chair external to the room, and I think, but it's hard to be sure, another inside the room. I see a person too. Center of the image. A man, I'd wager. Broad

shoulders and a head. It's brilliantly frustrating because I want to be inside the picture, standing in the hallway, at the vantage point of the painting, because it is so curious it feels like I need to be there to properly see it. See him amidst the chaotic gloom. I'm certain he's there. I can see him. Only I know that he's not. Or at least that's what the experts at Manchester Art Gallery say. There is, they claim, no one there. What I do know, however, is that this is a bedroom located at the back of a house on the first floor of Sixth Mornington Crescent in London.

It was painted by a celebrated German-born British artist named Walter Sickert. Sickert's work now hangs in some of the most celebrated galleries across the world. His paintings and sketches have been described as great, weird, odd, and unsettling. I also know that Sickert gave this moody and sinister scene the title Jack the Ripper's Bedroom. Which is doubly unnerving because the painting depicts what is, or was, I suppose, Walter Sickert's own bedroom. This has led some to conclude that this painting is a coded confession from none other than the Whitechapel murderer himself. Sickert, they claim, was Jack the Ripper, and, they

propose, he left us other damning clues too. Welcome back to After Dark. This is the third episode in our mini-series on covering the men who would be Jack the Ripper, and today we turn our attention to the celebrated artist Mr Walter Sickert. In this episode, we ask how he has become so associated with Ripper lore. We'll examine Sickert's work for the supposed clues they contain. Then we'll return to the archival documentation and ask what, if anything, these documents contain that has caused some to ask if Jack the Ripper has not been hanging in our National Galleries all this time. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony.

And we are, as Anthony said at the beginning, in the third episode of our mini-series on Jack the Ripper. Now, we've done two episodes already. We've looked at Prince Albert Victor, who was the grandson of Queen Victoria. And we've also looked at Aaron Kosminski, who was a Polish Jew living in Whitechapel around the time of the 1888 murders. And now in this episode, we're going to be looking at Walter Sickett. Now, Anthony, I'm going to ask you who Walter Sickett is, but I will say, whilst I don't know a huge amount about him, I know his name is attached to Jack the Ripper and he's quite a canonical, quite a famous suspect, isn't he? So tell us a little bit about the man and then we'll get into the accusations, the suspicions around him.

He is quite a canonical suspect and he is the first suspect that I became aware of as a teenager, actually, because of Patricia Cornwell's book. But we'll talk about that a bit later in the episode. But to give you a little bit more detail on Walter Sickert himself, he was born in Munich on the 31st of May 1860. So by the time of the Ripper murders, he was 28, which fits with some of the descriptions of who the supposed Ripper might be. It doesn't fit with others, actually, because who the supposed ripper might be. It doesn't fit with others actually, because those descriptions can be so disparate. His father was Oswald Sickert, who was also an artist, and his mother was Eleanor Louisa

Henry, and she was the illegitimate daughter of an astronomer named Richard Sheepshanks. Now I have never heard of Richard Sheepshanks, but that is a great surname. Also being the illegitimate daughter of an astronomer, that sounds cool. That's like a good tagline as a character. Maddie, you need to write that book, actually. Just a bit of fictionalized history and write that. The astronomer's daughter. Oh, yes. You're done.

So they were in what is now Germany. They were in Munich. But then when he was eight, they moved and settled in London. They got British nationality. So Walter Sickert then followed in his father's footsteps. And in 1881, he went to art school. He became an etching assistant to James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who was obviously a famous and very established artist at this time. But he was also influenced by a lot of the French Impressionist painters, including

Degas. Now, I am no art historian, I am no art expert, but I can see that in the painting that we discussed at the start of the episode, Jack the Ripper's bedroom. Yeah, I think that's fair. The Impressionist movement originates in Paris, but it's really interested in capturing moments or obviously impressions. It's interested in pieces of light, moments in time, sort of discreet everyday actions, like the beauty of someone taking a sip of water or the look exchanged between two people across a crowded bar or the sort of jaded expression of a barmaid, for example. It's really interesting in capturing

those in these really broad, on the surface, quite messy brush strokes. And I think you can see that in Sickett's work, you can see that desire to capture a fleeting feeling, a fleeting impression. And I think that's really interesting in the painting you were talking about at the beginning, I guess we can come on to talk about that in a bit more detail. But I think his interest in the impressionists and his interest in capturing those feelings are key to understanding really why he's been picked out as a suspect, but also why for my money I don't buy it. But you have time to convince me. So oh no, I won't be convinced. I don't think he's Jack the Ripper either. Yeah, let's get

to the end of the episode, but I don't think he is. But I totally buy everything you're saying. Can I just ask in terms of the Impressionists, Maddie, is urbanity and the urban landscape something that they're, it sounds like it is something they're concerned with because Sickert definitely is and he really wants to look at urban landscapes often in his early work, particularly poverty stricken or lower middle class landscapes that changes throughout his career. But you think that's pretty usual for the impressionists. I think they're interested in both urban environments and the countryside. And I will preface this by saying I'm very much not an expert on the impressionists at all. But yes, I mean, we can think about sort of degas scenes taking place at night in theatres. If you think about Renoir's boating party,

those moments when disjointed urban cities of the 19th century come together, when communities are formed in these fleeting moments when people don't necessarily know each other, but they've all gathered in the same space to witness the same spectacle, to take part in the same thing, whether it's being on a boat going down the river, whether it's drinking in a bar, whether it's watching a performance at the theatre. I think it's interesting that you see that in SICKIT, that you see this very isolated, technically empty room, but a room in, okay, it's not Paris, it's London, but another disjointed, disconnected 19th century city, one that's grappling with modernity, with the idea of the individual within that space, and that there's all these separate

lives moving together but not necessarily connecting in a meaningful way. And I think that's part of the fear of Jack the Ripper, right? That we have these victims who are seemingly random. Of course they're not, and there's a huge amount of work on who they were and how they ended up being these victims of the Ripper and who they were as people before that point. But I think Jack the Ripper is so terrifying because he's this faceless thing, this faceless demon who can move between these different separate spaces and these separate worlds. And he's this faceless thing, this faceless demon who can move between these different separate spaces and these separate worlds. And he's sort of the embodiment in some ways of

that anxiety about modernity, about the modern city and how disconnected it is and how dangerous it is. Can I ask, if we're looking at that image, and I'd love to know what listeners are seeing as well, if you look at that image just for a second before we move on to why he's been associated so closely with these crimes, can you see a figure in that image? To your eye, is there a figure in that image? I think that there is and I think that's part of the trick, isn't it? Yes, exactly. We're looking into this room and we're looking directly at a window or what appears to be a window and we've got these huge broad quite messy brushstrokes depicting what looks like a window

with a sort of slatted blind across it potentially. And so you're getting these sort of chinks of light coming in. It's already a messy scene And because we're looking directly into light, you've got this, what looks like a figure standing in front of a 19th century dressing table with a sort of oval shaped mirror above it attached to it. And it looks to me like someone looking in the mirror and that the light is just capturing the head and also their shoulders and arms. And interestingly, thinking about the Ripper, the colours in this painting are so muted, they're so dark, we've got lots of browns, we've got lots of greys and sort of mauves and purples. But then you've got this shock of red, you've got this blood red, scarlet red on the shoulders and arms of what looks

like this figure. And then also on the wall that's being illuminated by this window as well. To me it feels, and also I will say at the bottom of what I'm taking to be the figure, it looks like, I think it looks like a skirt. It looks like the bottom of a dress. I see what you're seeing. Not trousers and boots as you would expect for a 19th century man. To me it looks like a woman standing looking at her dressing table. But of course... There's nobody there.

Supposedly no one there. And we also know that it's Sickert's bedroom. It's really interesting. And not necessarily a woman's bedroom. So... Yeah. Ugh. There's layers.

Let's talk about that for a little bit. So this is apparently Sickert's bedroom. And this is the reason he becomes so linked to the Jack the Ripper case, that this is some kind of confession that he is almost saying, look, this is my bedroom. It is Jack the Ripper's bedroom. Here's the confession. We're going to put this image on our socials and we were so interested to hear what you're seeing, what your interpretation of this is. But let's have a look at some of the details that have so linked Sickert to this Jack the Ripper case. It is thought that he was slightly, I suppose, obsessed with the Ripper case himself. And I suppose that's a layer that we've put on afterwards, because let's be honest, a lot of people would have been consuming this news in a very avaricious way at this time.

This was headline news. I think sometimes it's very convenient for us in the modern age to go, oh, isn't that very distasteful that that person is tuning in so much to this murder? He does become distasteful in it, but in the fact that he was interested in the case alone, I'm not sure that marks him out as a killer. There is a history to the image. there is a history to the room, and that room was supposedly belonging to Jack the Ripper. And that comes from Sickert's old landlady at Sixth Mornington Crescent. She says, Jack the Ripper lived in this room. Now, that's fine.

I have some questions. Yeah, no, well, you can ask them, but I won't be able to answer them because this just appears, and it's this anecdotal thing that just adds to the lore, adds to the mystery. And of course, you want to believe it because a landlady might be sitting downstairs in her quarters and hearing Jack the Ripper come in from his nighttime violence and go, oh, I know what's going on, but I'm afraid to say anything. So it paints this dramatic picture, but she doesn't say how she knows, she doesn't say who that was, she doesn't say anything of that. It's just, oh, this was Jack the Ripper's room.

So my first question is, when does she claim that this is Jack the Ripper's room? And are we saying then that Sickert lived here after Jack the Ripper? There's so many questions. I will say as well, that if he's moving in to this house and this room that's supposedly been rented to Jack the Ripper, if he's moving in afterwards, he's inheriting this lore from the landlady, this story that someone hideous has occupied the space that he is now making his home, that he's now sleeping in, that he's potentially creating his art in. Thinking about Impressionism and this idea of this fleeting moment, is he evoking the ghost of Jack in that room? Is he looking back on this?

Is he thinking about this as a space that's been occupied by someone else, who's a sort of horrifying figure? Is that figure that we see in the painting the ghost of Jack? That's kind of my interpretation. So I can answer some of those questions. I was like, oh, I'm not going to know anything, but I do know some of those. The answer is yes. The Ripper was supposed to have occupied those rooms before Sickert did. So that was the landlady's story. And art historians have said that that story is what inspired Sickert to create that painting. He was not living there during the 1888 murders. But he was in London.

He was in London, yeah, yeah, yeah. But not in that particular room that the landlady says this was the room of Jack the Ripper. He moves in afterwards, as you have deduced. And also it's really important to remember that Sickert appears absolutely nowhere in the police reports from 1888. So this is a man who had an interest and I would maybe argue more than an interest and I do think we'll move on to this. I do think that he has an involvement in this case and I'd love to know your opinion on that when we get to it. But in terms of him occupying this room at this time, which by the way, we don't even know if this was Jack the Ripper's room, this is just a story that somebody has invented. And it feeds into this invention that Sickert then invents in his painting. So the landlady constructs this oral

narrative, and Sickert just takes that and turns it into a work of art. So it's this kind of creative exchange we're witnessing here. It's absolutely nothing suggests that this is a confession. So that just doesn't stack up. Also, the real villain of the piece here is the landlady. If she knew she was living with Jack the Ripper, why didn't she come forward at the time? Okay, you could argue maybe she was terrified for her own life. Why didn't she give the name of the occupant of that room at a later date? This just seems ridiculous. Is she interested in renting that room at a higher price to people

through some kind of morbid tourism later on? Yes, that's exactly what's happening here. She's inventing this sales pitch for her room. There's so many rooms you can rent in London, but not all of them are the former dwelling places of Jack the Ripper. And we've seen this in previous episodes where people continuously are cashing in on the Jack the Ripper mergers, even at the time. We think it's a much later invention, but it's really not. It's like it's happening at the time. And if you're interested in that, by the way, you can go back, dear listener, and find the

episode we did before this mini-series began, in which we looked at the press around these murders in 1888 and how the sort of media circus, I suppose, began in that moment. And we are the inheritors of that now. So, Anthony, let's just here that, so Sicket isn't named in the police reports in 1888. No. And he's not the Jack the Ripper living in the landlady's room, according to her. Nope. So at what point does he become associated with this case?

Cause it seems to me in his own lifetime, in his own moment in the 1880s, he has nothing to do with this other than he potentially after the fact rents a room that nothing to do with this other than he potentially, after the fact, rents a room that one woman claims Jack the Ripper lived in. That hardly implicates him in the crimes themselves. No. And okay, he paints Jack the Ripper's bedroom in 1906 slash 1907. So he's aligning himself with the lore a little bit there, but certainly not in any confessional way,

as far as I can discern it It's certainly not in the archive. But it's not until 1976, and this is key, that Sikert really starts to become a focus as one of the suspects. And that comes from a writer called Stephen Knight, who we've discussed in the first two episodes in this mini-series, and he wrote Jack the Ripper, The Final Solution, came out in 1976. I hate the title. I know, I know. And he suggests that Sigurd is involved somehow in this conspiracy theory

that we looked at with Prince Albert Victor and the Freemasons and Sigurd is somehow involved and he's helping to cover up Prince Albert Victor, but also he hated women and so he was happy to, you know, help be part of this cover up. But I mean, anybody who has looked at this case, not just historians, but enthusiasts who have looked at this case, very, very quickly discredit that. They just say, I mean, it doesn't add up. Their links are not there. It's fanciful. it doesn't make sense whatsoever.

Yeah, it sounds wild to me. I mean, it sounds like it would be the plot of a really sort of thrilling, long running television show, you know, sort of loosely based on real events, you can see it flashing up on the screen now. But in terms of factual historical research, this just sounds like nonsense. Okay, so he really becomes attached to the case in the 1970s because of this book. Why is there this interest in the 70s though, almost 100 years later, 90 years later, since these killings in Whitechapel. We know that there's this huge media interest in the years after the killings in the late 19th, early 20th century, but this seems like a moment of revival.

Why? I think this is key and it's not something that I had a full breadth of understanding of in the timeline because we weren't born in the 1970s. so this potentially as a cultural moment and a cultural reset in terms of feminism and what's happening around conversations relating to violence against women. The 70s is key because we see the emergence of Peter Sutcliffe, who is known as the Yorkshire Ripper. And this is really not accidental. His first victim was attacked in July 1975, Anna Rogulski. And Anna was a Woolworths worker. Sutcliffe attacked her when she was walking home

alone. She survived. There was another attack then in August, the 15th of August, when he attacked a woman called Olive Smelt. Then on the 27th of August, he attacked Tracy Brown, who was 14 at the time. And then in October, his first murder victim was Wilma Mary McCann. Now this is all happening in 1975, right? All before Stephen Knight's book comes out in 1976. So it's timing, and we've talked about this ourselves, about how we, and every single piece of literature that's published or listened to about Jack the Ripper feeds into some of this. But we see Sickert's Room being let out as part of the Jack the Ripper being sold within 12 months of Peter Sutcliffe's attacks and murders in Yorkshire. And you know, fast forward, there have been multiple books, some incredibly well received,

so many podcast episodes across however many things. And sometimes you and I struggle with this being part of this vernacular of Jack the Ripper. And that's why we really try to hone into the archival legacy of it and see what it can tell us about that past. But that for me seems like the reason that the 1970s are so key in our modern understanding of the Jack the Ripper case. I think it really links directly to Peter Sutcliffe and the murders and attacks in Yorkshire. And you know, the fact that Sutcliffe, I mean, we don't need to dwell on him too long, but

he's explicitly called the Yorkshire Ripper. That connection with the Victorian killings is made by the press really early on in the case. And I suppose the other thing about Sickert, just going back to Sickert himself, is that he has a lot of this fascination, this interest in what we would now call true crime as a genre. He's interested in the conversations around murders. And I think in Sickert's case, unfortunately, to a certain extent, the aesthetic of it. Yeah. We can push beyond interest because he's depicting some of these scenes or related scenes in his artwork.

And then come 1907, which is in and around the time he's painting Jack the Ripper's bedroom, the murder of Emily Dimock occurs. We can't get away from the fact that he is interested in those things. Which becomes known as the Cramdon town murder. And Sickert becomes fascinated, I suppose, obsessed, some might say, with that. And he paints a series of four paintings depicting the murder. And they have collectively become known as the Camden Town Murder series. And again, we won't dwell on this, but it's just worth pointing out that when you

see some of those images first, knowing the context you might think there is a woman. Sleep on a bed and a man sitting beside her on the bed but then you get the context of. What's going on and it becomes far more uncomfortable to look at so we're not going to dwell on those images. But they do, I think, ask a question of Sickert, as you are inferring there. But Medhi, there's actually something that's even more tangible, that some people who've researched this, there's something that's even more tangible around Sickert that links him more directly to the Ripper murders. And that, similar to Aaron Kosminski, is DNA evidence. I have a letter in front of me now. And this was postmarked the 15th of October 1888. By this date, Mary Ann Nicholls Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, and Catherine

Eddowes had all been murdered at the hands of the man who would become known as Jack the Ripper. The East End was in uproar, and a murderer was still on the loose. The letter is scrawled, I would suggest, rather than written. The handwriting spider-like crawls across the page. The paper on which it lies is now browned and splodged with age. The letter is brief. It reads, From Hell. Mr. Lusk.

Saur. I send you half the kidney I took from one woman. Preserved it for you. To their peace I fried and ate, it was very nice. I may send you the bloody knife that took it out if you only wait a while longer. Signed, Catch me when you can, Mr. Lusk. This is the infamous From Hell letter, one of only a handful of the many letters claiming to be from the Whitechapel murderer

that some experts believe could be genuine. Others I must point out dispute this. The best-selling crime writer Patricia Cornwall, however, is convinced of its authenticity. So much so that prior to 2002 she invested a significant amount of her personal money in undertaking forensic testing on the letter in order to determine its origins. This included DNA testing. Her findings were published in her best-selling book, Portrait of a Killer.

In her book, the scientists employed by Cornwall determined that there was a significant DNA link between this letter and one man. That man was Walter Sickert. Osiris, Hathor, Isis, Amun, Ra and Nubis. This September and October join me, Tristan Hughes, on the Ancients, as we explore the mysterious gods and goddesses of ancient Egypt. From the story of their creation out of primordial water, to how the sun god Ra voyaged across the sky in his boat during the day and battled evil creatures in the underworld by night, to the jackal-headed god Anubis

and what the Egyptians believed happened after death. Leading experts and atmospheric narration will guide you through the curious world of Egypt's ancient deities and how they were worshipped. Stay tuned for new episodes dropping every Thursday on the Ancients from History hit it, listen wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, that has changed the playing field a little bit. We'll talk about the DNA in a second, but I want to talk about the From Hell letter first, because I think it's fascinating. And I was really interested in how you read that, Anthony, and your interpretation of the voice, because what's intriguing about

the From Hell letter is that it's written in this kind of simulated, falsified voice that is, I suppose, meant to replicate someone from the lower classes, someone who's not speaking in a way that is considered proper at the time. There's hints of not only illiteracy in terms of the spelling, the grammar on the page, but also hints of in a spoken voice when you read it to yourself, a certain accent. And I think it's so interesting because we've talked with the other two suspects in this series about the assumptions that were made about some of the men who were accused or who have been accused in the years since. And on the one hand, we have the grandson of Queen Victoria, this person who belongs to

the absolute upper echelons of society. And then we had Aaron Kosminski, who was very much the opposite, who was potentially suffering from quite serious mental illness, who was a Polish Jewish immigrant living in Whitechapel, who was pushed to the periphery of society in all these different ways and considered less than everyone else, less than so-called respectable society. So tell me a little bit about how we come to have this letter. It's addressed to someone called Mr. Lusk. Who is that?

What's going on? And then we can talk about this DNA connection because that is fascinating. So this is popularly known as the From Hell letter, and it has literally inspired movies about it being so dramatic, but it was also known as the Lusk letter. So who is Lusk? So Lusk is George Lusk, and he was the chairman of the White Chapel Vigilance Committee. Now, this was not a police organization. It was a group of White Chapel volunteers and they were patrolling the streets in 1888

because of the need, basically. That's so interesting, isn't it? Thinking about, you know, we've talked about this disconnected modern city in the 19th century, and there being a sort of lack of community of people coming together and you get these little peripheral bubbles of groups based on maybe sort of ethnicity or religious identity or whatever. But here in Whitechapel you do get more of a community. I'm not saying it was all rosy and totally collaborative and wonderful, but you do get people coming together in the face of this terrible violence. Oh yeah, absolutely. And Lusk is at the head of that from the civilian point of view at

the very least. It is sent to him and this is quite key in some of the credence that's been given to this letter. It was sent to him with a half of a preserved human kidney. And the reason that that was important is because Catherine Eddow's kidneys had been removed by the killer. So when this letter arrived, people thought, ah, they're hinting at something that is not necessarily widely known. And he says that he ate the other part of the kidney. It has been since verified as a human kidney. Some people say they can get testing to such an extent that they can tell it's a female kidney of X amount

of age that would line up with Catherine Eddow's that had a drinking problem and that was very much fitted the profile. Other people say all we can really conclusively say is that it is a human kidney. So let's bear that in mind as we discuss this, but certainly that was seen as key at the time. Lusk, however, initially thought it was a hoax. He thought this was many of the fake letters that were going around. Policemen had been getting letters, the newspapers had been receiving letters, and he thought

this was one of that type of thing. However, there is something in this, I think. You will have noticed that I picked an Irish accent specifically when I read the letter and I think this is relevant to me that letter is written as an Irish person is written in a an Irish accent and a working class maybe even West of Ireland accent. If you look at the Sir is spelled S O R so they want you to pronounce as S O R. Mr Lusk is said at the end now there is a tendency even still now in Ireland, for some rural accents to put an S-H where there's just an S, so Mr. becomes Mr. Lusk.

And for me, when I read this, it seemed very obvious to me that there was an Irish element coming into it. And that is not coincidental, because just before Lusk receives this letter, a local shopkeeper in the area called Emily Marsh, she had a visitor at her shop. And her shop was in Myland Road. And it was a man who she thought was odd and unsettling, both in his appearance and speech. And he asked Emily Marsh for the address of Mr. Lusk. Not all that uncommon in Victorian era.

That would have happened all the time. That in itself isn't unusual. Yeah, and thinking about the urban landscape, right? In a time when not everyone could read, you might stop and ask directions to find someone's house if you didn't know how to read the street sign or the street number. And also you might say, you know, I'm looking for the printer shop or the pub and you would know it by the physical sign hanging outside. So like a boot or a lion's head or whatever it was, right. So the way that you navigate the city is very different. So this wouldn't have been unusual. Freddie Sayers No, no, not at all. The guy who asked for this address was literate because

Marsh remembers that he wrote the address in his personal notebook and left quickly. This was her description of him. Slim, wearing a long black overcoat, about six foot tall, and spoke with a distinct Irish accent. He had a dark beard and a mustache. Now, I don't think this man is Jack the Ripper, but I think there's a world in which it is Walter Sickert. What? Even though he's not Irish. Yeah.

Walter Sickert had initially wanted to become an actor. And the distinctness of this Irish accent and the dark beard and the mustache. It's a bit theatrical. Yes, right? It's theatrical. The distinctness of this Irish accent and the dark beard and the mustache. It's a bit theatrical. Yes, right. It's theatrical. It's a bit fake nose and glasses. Absolutely. This is what I think. And I think when she's saying he's unsettling in his manner and appearance and speech, she's picking up on that caricature potentially.

Listen, I am putting two and two together here and I might be getting six. But. Well, you are an Irishman and an actor. So, you know, it's all out. Potentially, listen, I am putting two and two together here and I might be getting six, but... Well, you are an Irishman and an actor, so, you know, it's... Exactly, like there's some instinct coming into play here. And listen, whoever that was, whoever went into Emily Marsh's shop that day pretending to be Irish, and I really do think it was a pretense, I think there's a really good chance they wrote this letter because it's

that overly Irish thing again. Irish people wouldn't spell this letter like this, you know what I mean? But if you are faking, if you wanted somebody to hear an Irish accent in a letter, this is how you'd write it. I also think there's a disparity between the letter itself, which is written in a way, again, it's that overdone thing. And I'm finding this myself in the research that I'm doing for my next book, which partly looks at letters of a hoaxer from the 18th century, but it's written in a Devonshire accent. And it's actually, I think, falsified by newspaper men who are trying to

ham up the accent that she does have and to try and paint her as this illiterate, unintelligent person that she very much wasn't in her actual life. And I think we're getting that here, this kind of this simulated vernacular, this fake way of talking. And then you're saying that this figure as well, that he goes into the to Marsha's shop and he writes down the address to me, someone who's struggling to articulate themselves on paper in that letter, wouldn't with ease pull out a notebook. I don't even think a person who wrote like that would necessarily be carrying a notebook in the 19th century.

And then write down with no hesitation. He doesn't ask her to write it down for him. He writes it down. That suggests to me someone who is completely literate and can write and read with ease. I buy everything that you're saying here about the theatricality, the long black coat, the dark beard and mustache, the very heavy Irish accent. This all feels like a disguise. I don't think it's enough to link it to Sigurd though. Okay, bear with me on this. I don't think it's conclusively enough, but there's some

circumstantial DNA evidence that helps us link this letter to Sigurd. So Patricia Cornwell believes that this letter is absolutely legitimate because of the kidney. Now that's an interpretation of the archival material. It could easily be argued against. So Patricia Cornwell is absolutely convinced that the letter is legitimate. Her task then was she wanted to find out who wrote this letter because she said, well look, that's the key. If I find out who wrote this letter, I will be able to say who Jack the Ripper was. Now, she arrives at the conclusion that it was Sickert and here's how she gets to it. She says that as a child, Sickert had a number of operations that were apparently

incredibly painful and they led to him becoming impotent. Now, others say, and I haven't seen this myself in any of the research I've done around this, that there is no proof that he had any operations. So let alone that he was impotent. We definitely don't know that he was impotent. But this is her hypothesis. While I agree that there might be something to the kidney, when it comes to this impotent thing, I don't see it anywhere in the archive. Now, I will say, let's take note of it though, in terms of all of these victims, because in nearly all the cases, sex and the threat of male sex, or the lack of male sex, but certainly male sexual appetite is at the heart of a lot of what we're discussing here. And I think that's, and something's gone wrong with that

sexual appetite. Well, yeah, I mean, it's, it's horrendous misogyny that is, I think you're right, it's sort of tied to that. And we, you know, we're not psychologists, but I do think it's legitimate to make that connection. Yes. Yeah, yeah. That, that it's. Something has gone wrong with somebody's sexual appetite and they end up being violent. And as you say, absolutely laced with misogyny. Impotence here is pictured as a threat to society. Men are not living up to what they should be doing and so they act out and in the failure of manhood, women bear the brunt. So it's an interesting hypothesis,

because you say we're not psychologists, so we'll just leave that there as what she thinks is going on. But as a result of his impotence, she believes he hates women. I don't see that myself anywhere, but that's Cornwall's take. I think you can absolutely see his misogynistic ideas, I think you can absolutely see his misogynistic ideas, just harking back to what you were saying about his interest in the murder of other women at the turn of the century and his need to depict that in his art, that feels very dark and scary to me. I'm not convinced by the connection though, between the art and the misogyny and the impetus. And I think it's slightly difficult to make that connection. As you say, we can't access Sickett's medical history, we can't access his bodily experience. I'm just not convinced by that connection and that being the root cause of everything.

If she's saying that he is then Jack the Ripper. Well, if she had that thought as to the grounding of what led Sickert to, in her opinion, led Sickert to Whitechapel in 1888, she, I think, like you, she was like, I can't quite draw that together. That's all conjecture. So I need something a little bit more concrete. And she went for something which in the 21st century is almost infallible and that is DNA evidence. So what she did was she got a letter that she knew Walter Sickert had sent. She took the stamp from that letter, she paid for all of this herself with her own private

funds and at considerable cost. Had the stamp on that letter tested for his DNA and then did the same with the From Hell letter and compared the DNA findings. There was a match for Sikert on the From Hell letter, but since then other DNA experts have come out to say that the mitochondrial DNA that was found on that stamp could belong to anything up to 10%. So between 1% and 10% of the population in London at this time. And I think we need to bear in mind what we heard Professor Tory King say in the previous episode on Kosminski about how complex these things are and how there are

many many problems with the extraction of this type of DNA in this way. So it's tricky. Like 1 to 10% of the population is still a fairly low odds. That means there's a 90% chance that Sickert at least is in that category, you know? Okay, my instinct, if I were to let myself do what Cornwall has done, my instinct says maybe he did write that letter. Maybe he did go to that shop. But I think he was inserting himself into the case in some kind of lurid way rather than necessarily him being Jack the Ripper. But maybe, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.

Yeah, and I suppose if we allow all of that and we accept all of that, it is slightly worrying that he delivered the letter with half of a human kidney for a start, so not great. The other thing I will say, just to muddy the waters here as well, how do we know that it was Sickard who licked the stamp on his letter? How can we know that he did that? I just think instantly that's a question mark. There's loads, isn't there? Like that's the problem, right? There's so many question marks. Before we sum up though, I want to introduce one other piece of Sikert's art and just to compare it with what we've seen at the top and then we can just round up by having a discussion about

some of these threads that we've started to unpick and see where we are. We finish then as we began, with Walter Sickert's art. This time it's a rendering of the famous 20th century actress Peggy Ashcroft. The painting, once again oil on canvas, is based on a black and white photograph of Peggy, who was on holiday in Venice at the time it was taken. It was then published in the Radio Times magazine. Sickert, scrolling in the bottom right-hand corner

of the painting, has named his work Variations on Peggy. It is rendered in hues of green and pink. Peggy stands on a bridge or balcony, the watery urban landscape behind her. Though it is moody and contemplative, as was Jack the Ripper's bedroom, there is significantly more clarity in this painting. Significantly more life on display than in the earlier work. It is muted, but there is acknowledgement of this woman's life rather than a fixation on the death of various women including Emily Dimmock, the victim in the case of the Camden Town murder in 1907,

or the victims of Jack the Ripper. It serves its subject, I can't help but feel, in a way that Sickert's earlier work did not perhaps. And yet it is haunting in its own way. Somehow the shadow of the Ripper is never too far from Sickert's proverbial door. So was Walter Sickert Jack the Ripper? I'm guessing you think the answer is no. No I don't think he was Jack the Ripper. I don't think there's any evidence to suggest he was.

The DNA evidence on the stamp is interesting but it's hugely flawed. I think we have a problem with his art in terms of the depiction of particularly Emily Dimmock and perhaps some of the fascinations with the Ripper case that he puts into his art although the Ripper bedroom is he puts into his art. Although the Ripper bedroom is interesting because it becomes a conversation piece in many ways, and there is no depiction of violence. So that's interesting. I think we need to look at why he felt the need to depict Emily Dimmock specifically, or women inspired by Emily Dimmock in his Camden Town Murder series, you know, as you were saying earlier, it feeds into

a strange obsession with naked dead female bodies. And we know that obsession continues today and it's really problematic. And it's the sexualization of women in horrendous situations. There's no defense for this. You know, we can't sit here and go, Walter Sickert is an innocent man, and he should never have been mentioned in the same title as Jack the Ripper. There's some very unsavory and unpalatable things happening here. And I think for some people in the 19th century, that would have been the case.

Some people would not have liked to look at these paintings in the 19th century. It's not imposing 21st century morals on the painting, I don't think. There's a chance he wrote that letter. There's a chance he was the man that went to Emily Marsh's store in Myland Road. Which is really grotesque that he did that. It absolutely. But this is the right, there's a huge grotesqueness around him. I don't see why people are saying he might be Jack the Ripper, but I think you've just put your finger on it because he is in many ways grotesque. As was the Ripper murders.

Yeah, I think if he did write that letter or he did want to insert himself, we see at the very, very least we can say that he connects himself to Jack the Ripper by painting his own bedroom and labeling it Jack the Ripper's bedroom. He makes that connection himself. And nobody else does that. None of the other suspects so far do that. He does. No. And that's very interesting, him evoking the Ripper and the killings. And I think if you think back to that original painting that we were talking about, that emptiness, the supposed emptiness of the room, the ambiguity of whether or not that's a figure and this fleeting moment of an empty space being potentially occupied by something terrifying. For me,

he's interested in the theatricality of murder, the aesthetic of it. Yes, I agree. But specifically, he's certainly not interested in the victims and anything other than the aesthetic value as he sees it. He doesn't care about the women who were killed by Jack the Ripper or by the other murders that he paints later. But I think he's interested in the killer himself. He's interested in the fact that Jack the Ripper is ambiguous.

And to a large extent, I agree, we talked at the beginning about Hallie Rubenhold's position, the author of The Five, of not caring who he is, because I sort of don't want to know anything about him. And he's not worth remembering. But I think Sickett's fascination with him, the way that Sickett is interested in the identity of a killer, the celebrity, and potentially possibly tries to insert himself in that story by writing the letter, possibly. And I'm not really convinced that he did do that, but it does seem that at least one person was writing these hoax letters, if not multiple people all trying to insert themselves in that story. And that's fascinating to me, this obsession with who the killer was in the 19th century and what it

can tell us about masculinity, about misogyny, about how people understood the city, the urban landscape, the experience of living specifically in London, specifically in the East End at that time, how people viewed poverty, how people viewed the lower classes, how people viewed the immigrant community, all of that. It can tell us so much. And I think that's what Sickert's interested in, but in this very grotesque, lurid way. Yeah. I think, let's say Sickert is not Jack the Ripper.

He nonetheless feeds into the culture that enabled a person like Jack the Ripper to emerge. And I think he identifies himself within that culture in many ways. Yeah, he's a fascinating one. He, to me, is one of the most interesting and this idea around, as you say, his masculinity, his impotence and how that might've fed into violence, which of course is, I don't buy that, but I'm just, it's part of the conversation, you know, and I think we address those parts of the conversation. His ability to act, his ability to depict these things. Yeah, it's, he for me is the strangest, I think, so far. Let's see where we go in our final episode.

And I think it's interesting that even though he tries to insert himself in that conversation early on, it's actually almost a hundred years later in the 1970s, when that connection is explicitly made and he's brought into the narrative by riperologists. And there's something interesting there as well about his sort of revival, his second wind in the 20th century and how he's remembered as an artist but also linked to this story in new ways. I find that really troubling and interesting in equal measure. So we've had three suspects so far and we're going to do one more. I'm really interested, Anthony, in the figures that you've chosen for this series because there are so many to choose from. There are so many men linked to the Ripper case and whose names come up as suspects.

And I think what you've selected for us so far is a fascinating blend, a fascinating range of people from different walks of life who are linked to this. Can you give us any clues about who's coming up in the final episode or not? Is it a total secret? So in episode four, we're going to explore a figure who was instantly linked to the Jack the Ripper case at the time in the 1880s because of medical knowledge. It was assumed at the time that whoever was carrying out these murders had some medical knowledge. It's not an area we've explored in the first three episodes, but episode four ventures down that alleyway. Well, I'm really looking forward to discussing that with you. If you've been enjoying this episode, you can find many more After Dark episodes on lots of topics. We've got ghosts

who changed the law. We've got women pirates. We've got ghosts who change the lore, we've got women pirates, we've got everything you could possibly think of, we've got all kinds of monsters and villains and interesting and dark historical moments that we explore. We've had a lot of new listeners recently, Anthony, and I'm really excited by this. It's so nice to have new people join and so many people have been reaching out to us on socials to say that they've discovered us for the first time. So welcome if that is you. If you're a fan of history, then you might also like to know about some of the other history hit podcasts. There are others out there, although we are biased about After Dark, of course, but you can also catch the brilliant Dr. Kate Lister on Betwixt the Sheets, which is a podcast all about sex, scandal and society.

Or you might fancy American History Hit with Don Wildman. This is a show that covers the biggest names and events in American history. At a time, I think it's fair to say, when all that is being revisited in our own moment. If you want to get in touch with us, if you want to suggest an episode topic, or you just want to tell us that you're loving the show, you can email our producers at afterdark at historyhit.com. See you next time.