The Openshaw letter that yielded the mitochondrial DNA results was written on A Pirie amp;; Sons stationery. The letter is postmarked October 29, 1888, mailed in London, and reads:
ENVELOPE: Dr. Openshaw
Pathological curator
London Hospital
White chapel
LETTER: Old boss you was rite it was
the left kidny i was goin to
hopperate agin close to your
ospitle just as i was goin
to dror mi nife along of
er bloomin throte them
cusses of coppers spoilt
the game but i guess i wil
be on the job soon and will
send you another bit of
innerds Jack the ripper
O have you seen the devle
with his mikerscope and scalpul
a lookin at a Kidney
with a slide cocked up
One reason I believe this letter is genuine is that it is so blatantly contrived. The bad handwriting looks disguised and is jarringly inconsistent with the handwriting of someone with access to pen and ink and fine-quality watermarked stationery. The address on the envelope is literate, the spelling perfect, which is vastly different from the overblown illiteracy of the letter with its inconsistent misspellings, such as "kidny" and -Kidney," "wil" and "will," "of" and "o." Steward P. Evans and Keith Skinner point out in their extremely helpful book jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell that the postscript in the Dr. Openshaw letter alludes to i verse in an 1871 Cornish folktale:
Here's to the devil,
With his wooden pick and shovel,
Digging tin by the bushel,
With his tail cock'd up!
An allusion to a Cornish folktale makes no sense if we are supposed to believe this Openshaw letter was written by an uneducated homicidal maniac who ripped a kidney from a victim and sent it off in the mail.
Walter Sickert visited Cornwall as a boy. He painted in Cornwall when he was Whistler's apprentice. Sickert knew Cornwall and the Cornish people. He was well read and was familiar with folk tunes and music-hall songs. It is unlikely that a poor, uneducated person from London spent time in Cornwall or sat around in the slums reading Cornish folktales.
One could argue - and should - that the absence of a reliable known reference source, in this instance Walter Sickert's DNA, suggests we are assuming without conclusive scientific evidence that the single-donor sequence from the Openshaw letter was deposited by Walter Sickert, alias Jack the Ripper. We can't assume any such thing.
Although statistically the single-donor sequence excludes 99% of the population, in Dr. Ferrara's words, "The matching sequences might be a coincidence. They might not be a coincidence." At best, we have a "cautious indicator" that the Sickert and Ripper mitochondrial DNA sequences may have come from the same person.
Chapter Fifteen. A Painted Letter
Walter Sickert was a forensic scientist's worst adversary. He was like a twister tearing through a lab.
He created investigative chaos with his baffling varieties of papers, pens, paints, postmarks, and disguised handwritings, and by his constant moving about without leaving a trail through diaries, calendars, or dates on most of his letters and work. His knockout punch to forensic science was to decide to be cremated. When a body is burned at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, that's the end of DNA. If Sickert left behind samples blood or hair that we could be certain were his, we have yet to find them.
Not even a pedigree of Sickert's DNA can be attempted because that would require a sample from his children or siblings. Sickert had no children. His sister had no children. As far as anyone can tell, none of his four brothers had children. To exhume Sickert's mother, father, or siblings on the remote chance that their mitochondrial DNA might have something in common with what Bode laboratories miraculously managed to conjure up from the genetic fragments of past lives we gave them would be ridiculous and unthinkable.
The Ripper case is not one to be conclusively solved by DNA or fingerprints, and in a way, this is good. Society has come to expect the wizardry of forensic science to solve all crimes, but without the human element of deductive skills, teamwork, very hard investigation, and smart prosecution, evidence means nothing. Had we gotten an irrefutable DNA match of a Sickert and a Ripper letter, any sharp defense attorney would say that Sickert's writing a letter doesn't prove he murdered anyone. Perhaps he simply composed a number of Ripper letters because he had a wacky, warped sense of humor. A good prosecutor would counter that if Sickert wrote even one of those Ripper letters, he was in trouble, because the letters are confessional. In them, the Ripper claims to have murdered and mutilated people he calls by name, and he threatens to kill government officials and police.
The watermarks add yet another layer. To date, three Ripper letters and eight Sickert letters have the A Pirie amp; Sons watermark. It seems that from 1885 to 1887, the Sickerts' 54 Broadhurst Gardens stationery was A Pirie, and was folded at the middle like a greeting card. The front of the fold was bordered in pale blue, the embossed address also pale blue. The A Pirie amp; Sons watermark is centered on the crease. In the three Ripper letters, the stationery was torn along the crease and only half of the A Pirie amp; Sons watermark remains.
Unless Jack the Ripper was incredibly stupid, he would have removed the side of folded stationery that was embossed with the address. This is not to say that criminals haven't been known to make numbskull oversights, such as leaving a driver's license at a crime scene or writing a "stick-up" note on a deposit slip that includes the bank robber's address and Social Security number. But Jack the Ripper did not make fatal errors, or he would have been caught at the time of his crimes.
Jack the Ripper was also arrogant and did not believe he would ever be caught. Sickert must not have been worried about the partial watermarks on the Ripper letters he wrote. Perhaps this was another "catch me if you can" taunt. The A Pirie amp; Sons watermarks we found on Sickert stationery include a watermarked date of manufacturing, and the three partial dates on the Ripper letters with the A Pirie amp; Sons watermark are 18 and 18 and 87. The 87, obviously, is 1887.
Repeated trips to archives turned up other matching watermarks that must not have worried Sickert, either. Letters Sickert wrote to Jacques-Emile Blanche in 1887 are on stationery with the address embossed in black, and a Joynson Superfine watermark. A search through the Blanche-Sickert correspondence in the Institut Bibliotheque de L'Institut de France in Paris shows that during the late summer and fall of 1888 and in the spring of 1889, Sickert was still using Joynson Superfine paper with the return address of 54 Broadhurst Gardens either embossed with no color or in bright red with a red border.
Letters Ellen wrote to Blanche as late as 1893 with a 10 Glebe Place, Chelsea, return address are on stationery that also has the Joynson Superfine watermark. In the Whistler collection at Glasgow, there are seven Sickert letters with the Joynson Superfine watermarks, and it would appear that Sickert was using this stationery about the same time he was using A Pirie amp; Sons.
In the Sir William Rothenstein collection at Harvard University's Department of Manuscripts, I found two other Sickert letters with the Joynson Superfine watermark. Rothenstein was an artist and a writer, and a trusted enough friend of Sickert's that the latter felt comfortable asking him to lie under oath. During the late 1890s, Sickert had become friendly with a Madame Villain, a fishwife in Dieppe he referred to as "Titine." Although there was no evidence he committed adultery with her, she did supply him room and board and a space in her small home that he used as a studio. Whatever the nature of their relationship, it would have been used against him in court had he contested Ellen's divorce suit, which he did not. "If subpoenaed," he wrote to Rothenstein in 1899, during the divorce, "you might truly remain as you are in ignorance of Titine's very name. You might say I always call her 'Madame.' "