She is a hack writer who pumps out lame mystery novels, and she didn't find DNA, she discovered a letter written by Sickert that was written on the same type of paper,
Silkert was a sick bastard, but there isn't any real evidence other than being a dickless (seriously) mysoginist,
Experts on the topic have dismissed her work in it's entirety, and really she didn't discover Sicker as a suspect, he was discussed as a suspect after a weird painting he did in 1910 that depicted a brutal murder in Camden,
This is a rebuttle written by an expert on the topic, and posted in a JtR newsgroup,
It just reaffirms how people brush over the facts to make the story fit their theory!
I have a feeling that if you were to speak with Ms. Cornwell, she would brush over that little tidbit and say something about how no one knows for sure that Joseph was Walter's son, or something to that affect. Anyway, Joseph already admitted that the story he told Knight was made up.
And, in regards to the fine writing paper, lots of people would have had access to it. Even if you say that 1% of the London population had access to that paper, it would still be too many people to solely implicate Sickert.
Wolf wrote an excellent article for Ripper Notes (and it is posted here in the Dissertations) entitled "The Art of Murder"... if you haven't read it yet, then please do! As always, Wolf says it much better than I could ever try.
It's funny... one of my friends that knows of my interest in Jack the Ripper made a comment to me the other day; she said that at this point, whoever Jack was, it must be someone famous because that is all the information we have now. And in a way, she's right. We lost so much information in the blitz, and celebrities are researched and documented much more than nobodys. Which is why we have Royal Conspiracies, and accusations against famous writers and painters, and other persons of note (famous or infamous). I almost feel sorry for them!
I think that if Cornwell had done a little more research before ripping up a bunch of paintings (and boy, is the art society going ape over that!) and spending that much money on testing, she would have realized that she still would not have concrete proof that Sickert was the Ripper. For instance
1. How many people handled the paintings? Earlier fingerprints could be obscured by new ones.
2. What is the likelihood of finding DNA on anything that is so old and has been handled so much? I know they have pulled DNA from mummies, but this is different. They pulled body tissue from the inside or drilled for pulp in the teeth, and the mummies were, for the most part, undisturbed or sparingly handled.
3. Sickert changed the names of his paintings frequently. "The Camden Town Murder" painting was originally called "What Shall We Do For Rent?" or something like that, and it had an even earlier title as well. It is not clear that the woman is dead, and she doesn't look like Kelly in the picture. Her arms are not posed the same, for one thing. I know that there are others that Cornwell claims look like the murder victims, but I just don't see it.
Anyway, enough of this chattering! Have a great day!
Warm regards,
Divia deBrevier
Patricia Cornwell was born June 9th 1956 in Miami, Florida to Marilyn ("Pat") and Sam Daniels. Her father was an appellate attorney, her mother a secretary. The parents divorced and Marilyn and the three children (Patricia and two brothers) moved to Montreat, North Carolina, when she was seven. Ruth and Billy Graham lived two miles down the road and it was Ruth Graham who once gave her a leather-bound journal and told her to write. She transferred from King College, Tennessee to Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. After graduating she married her former English professor (Charles Cornwell who is seventeen years her senior) and newly married she started as a reporter for the Charlotte Observer in 1979. Soon she became a police reporter and in 1984 she took a job in the Virginia medical examiner's office. For six years she worked at the morgue, first as a technical writer, then as a computer analyst. She also volunteered to be a city cop and got her first taste of community policing. In 1988 she decided she didn't want to be a preacher's wife and she and her husband divorced in 1989.
I thought that was her title. The rest of the article is devoted to her hack writing. I'm still going to take a good look at that book on Jack the Ripper. She supposedly did find DNA in one of the paintings that matched the DNA on one of the letters. She even said that it could have been Sickert writing a crank letter and posing as Jack.