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I saw that. I couldn't stop laughing at the bit where she watched an old film of Sickert. She kept shaking her head and saying "Look at that evil bastard! It is totally him, he is so the killer"
And she then spent about five million quid proving nothing at all.
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quote:Originally posted by Roy: I saw that. I couldn't stop laughing at the bit where she watched an old film of Sickert. She kept shaking her head and saying "Look at that evil bastard! It is totally him, he is so the killer"
And she then spent about five million quid proving nothing at all.
Indeed. It all came down to "ooh, he is sooo teh Ripar!1!". Of course, Cornwell herself went a bit doolally for a while, in her gated community home in Virginia. Hints of paranoid psychotis seemingly related to moving in with a female partner and turning a shade survivalist. So... her ability to reason using evidence might not've been at its peak during the Sickert thing.
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quote:Originally posted by Ganesh: She continued to maintain Sickert was TEH RIPPAR!!1 on the basis of ancient photographic imagery of him as an old man in which his eyes looked, like, really really evil.
Maybe she's lost it since she wrote the book then. I don't really know that much about Jack the Ripper, but I'm familiar with the suspects, and Sickert is the only one where there was any kind of evidence at all, in the form of the letters that were sent to the press. I think the basis of her theory was that the letters were written by Sickert, and they contained information that only the killer could have known, therefore Sickert was the killer. It's interesting because any other theory I've read about just dismisses the letters outright.
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She was convinced there was some sort of evidence hidden inside one of Sickert's paintings, wasn't she? She bought it and cut it open; there was nothing, but she clung to her theory anyway, on "he looks evil" grounds. If she'd started out with a more convincing hypothesis, I suspect she devalued it somewhat in the course of the televised version.
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Didn't Sickert paint a picture called something like "I am the Ripper and to prove it I've painted a picture with Ripper in the title"?
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