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How Ripperology Works · Stuff You Should Know

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  Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
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  Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know
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  Speaker 1: from how Stuff Works dot Com? Brought to you by
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  Speaker 1: Consumer Guide Automotive We make Garbine easier. Hello, and welcome
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  Speaker 1: to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, as staff writer here
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  Speaker 1: at how Stuff Works dot Com. With me is my trust,
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  Speaker 1: the edit, Tricks, the Intrepid, Candice Gifts and how are
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  Speaker 1: you Candidas? Well, I hope you are feeling intrepid right now.
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  Speaker 1: We're about to enter some grizzly territory. Let's talk about
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  Speaker 1: Jack the Ripper, shall we? Indeed? Okay, so specifically, could
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  Speaker 1: Jack the Ripper have been an artist? Ah the artists
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  Speaker 1: formerly known as Jack the Ripper a k a. One
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  Speaker 1: Walter Sickert, a British impressionist painter. He would have been
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  Speaker 1: twenty eight around the time of the famous Ripper murders,
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  Speaker 1: also called the Canonical murders. These take place back from
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  Speaker 1: August thirty one November nine, just as had the scene
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  Speaker 1: for you, and it would have been more than just
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  Speaker 1: doves crying and that dank and depraved east end of
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  Speaker 1: line done in the Whitechapel District. It would have been
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  Speaker 1: the sound of prostitutes. Um More specifically, his prey of
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  Speaker 1: choice was the alcoholic, drunk, middle aged and unattractive prostitutes.
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  Speaker 1: It's the unattractive part that really gets you, you know.
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  Speaker 1: I mean, it's bad enough as it is, but unattractive
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  Speaker 1: to the problem is is Jack the Ripper was never caught,
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  Speaker 1: and as such, a kind of field of amateur investigation
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  Speaker 1: called ripparology has grown up over the centuries um of
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  Speaker 1: people who dedicate their time trying to figure out who
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  Speaker 1: Jack the Ripper was, right, right, right, And over the
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  Speaker 1: years police departments in London to have fingered about a
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  Speaker 1: hundred seventy suspects in the case, but no one's ever
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  Speaker 1: been definitively convicted of the crime. And back in two
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  Speaker 1: thousand two, someone who wasn't even a real ripparologist sort
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  Speaker 1: of took a stab at the case, no pun intended,
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  Speaker 1: and that was crime novelist Patricia Cornwell. And she was
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  Speaker 1: the one who named Walter Sickert. And she had you know, um,
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  Speaker 1: hard evidence and some sort of I don't know, loosely
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  Speaker 1: based evidence, and the loosely based evidence was sort of
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  Speaker 1: relevant to her to her interpretation of Secrets art. Now actually, um, yeah,
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  Speaker 1: she considered some of Secrets paintings confessional, like he had
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  Speaker 1: actually painted, um or used the murdered prostitutes that he
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  Speaker 1: murdered as models for some of his paintings, and that
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  Speaker 1: that um, he was either tawning police or getting this
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  Speaker 1: off his chest through these paintings, or he could have
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  Speaker 1: been super authentic because he was taught under the school
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  Speaker 1: of American painter James Whistler, who recommended that secret paint
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  Speaker 1: from life. So, um, if you wanted to paint dead
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  Speaker 1: prostitutes only made sense. Awesome first, what better way to
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  Speaker 1: do it than? Yeah than that? Now? Actually, in a
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  Speaker 1: nine FBI psychological profile of Jack the Ripper, um, one
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  Speaker 1: of the one of the points they concluded was that
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  Speaker 1: the Ripper probably would have um either gotten some of
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  Speaker 1: his rage out in between murders by drawing pictures of
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  Speaker 1: brutalized women, are writing, you know, fantasy stories about brutalizing women,
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  Speaker 1: so sicker kind of fits that bill. But really, one
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  Speaker 1: of the problems with basing your theory on art is
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  Speaker 1: that artists so widely open to interpretation, especially impressionism. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: and that's what's kind of wild about this point of
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  Speaker 1: Cornwell's argument. The painting that she was using as her
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  Speaker 1: most damning evidence was called the camed in Town Murder,
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  Speaker 1: and this featured a man sitting on the edge of
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  Speaker 1: a bed and while he's dressed, there's a woman in
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  Speaker 1: bed whose neket and ostensibly dead, and she was saying, look, look,
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  Speaker 1: this is it, y'all. This is the ultimate tantamount confession.
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  Speaker 1: But another critic pointed out that the painting has an
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  Speaker 1: alternate title, and that is what shall we do for rent? Right?
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  Speaker 1: So the the murderer and murdered woman go uh to
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  Speaker 1: a desperate couple down on their luck, just with the
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  Speaker 1: change of the time, right right, very here, scu a tonue.
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  Speaker 1: She she didn't base her theory entirely on her interpretation
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  Speaker 1: of secrets, though she actually um with her vast millions
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  Speaker 1: um purchased some paintings to try to find clues and
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  Speaker 1: actually tore one apart, which the curator of the Royal
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  Speaker 1: Academy in London later called monstrously stupid publicly um that action.
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  Speaker 1: But she also had some hard evidence. Yeah, she has
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  Speaker 1: an empty DNA in her bag, mitchondrial DNA and the
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  Speaker 1: glitch with this is that monicondrial DNA only comes from
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  Speaker 1: our mother's lineage, so it's discounting your your father's and
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  Speaker 1: put into you essentially, So using that to confirm the
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  Speaker 1: identity of someone is only half right. It's and it
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  Speaker 1: turns out it left about fifty thou people in London
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  Speaker 1: at that time it could have produced a match. Strangely though,
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  Speaker 1: one of them was Walter Sicker. And the way she
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  Speaker 1: found a match was she compared um some secrets DNA
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  Speaker 1: with DNA samples taken from the Ripper letters. Now, from
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  Speaker 1: the time of the murders till about nineteen sixty, hundreds
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  Speaker 1: of letters came in ostensibly written by Jack the Ripper. Um.
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  Speaker 1: Most ripperologists don't think he out any of them. But um,
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  Speaker 1: she Cornwell found that Secret had written one or two
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  Speaker 1: of them. Uh. Now she kind of jumped to a
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  Speaker 1: conclusion saying that you know, in her opinion that meant
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  Speaker 1: he was the Ripper. But uh a ripperologist, um kind
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  Speaker 1: of put it into perspective. Thanking Cornwell for all of
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  Speaker 1: her hard work and research improving that Walter Secret was
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  Speaker 1: indeed one of the people who wrote fraudulent Jack the
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  Speaker 1: Ripper letters so well, that was rather tongue in chic
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  Speaker 1: and if you want to learn more about this case,
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  Speaker 1: there's so much more to learn. Check out Could Jack
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  Speaker 1: the Ripper have been an artist? On how stuff works
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