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heavily and enjoyed the company of many men. As a result, he failed to receive consistent care and contact with stable adult role models. His anger would have become internalized, and in his younger years he would have expressed his pent-up destructive emotions by creating fires and torturing small animals, seeking an employment where he could work alone and experience his destructive fantasies such as butcher, mortician’s helper, medical examiner’s assistant or hospital attendant. He would have had some type of physical abnormality, although not severe, but he would have perceived this as being psychologically crippling. He would have been seen as being quiet, a loner, shy, slightly withdrawn, obedient and neat and orderly in appearance. He lived or worked in the Whitechapel area. The first homicide would have been in close proximity to either his home or workplace. Finally, prior to each homicide, the subject would be in a local pub, drinking spirits, which would lower his inhibitions, and would be observed walking all over the Whitechapel area during the early-evening hours. He did not specifically seek a certain look in a woman; however, it was by no accident that he killed prostitutes.
    Altogether it was a rather austere presentation, serving theRipper with the gravitas a serious criminal case no doubt deserved, but the real thrust of the proceedings was to get these esteemed experts in crime history, law, forensics and murder investigation to pick a likely candidate to be the Ripper. They had five suspects to choose from: Roslyn D’Onston Stephenson, Montague Druitt, Prince Albert Victor, Sir William Gull and ‘Kosminski’, and each suspect was put forward with reasons for their candidacy. But the results of the investigation were rather interesting; each member of the panel independently chose ‘Kosminski’, albeit for differing reasons. A studio audience vote was, perhaps, less surprising, with the most votes going to Sir William Gull and Prince Albert Victor, proof that the royal conspiracy theory had bitten very deep into the public consciousness.
    Another name that had been lingering on the outskirts of Ripper theories for many years was finally put in the frame as a
bona fide
suspect himself: Walter Sickert. Jean Overton Fuller’s
Sickert and the Ripper Crimes
16 took its central idea from claims made by Ms Fuller that Sickert’s friend Florence Pash had told her that Sickert had seen all the victims, presumably at the murder sites. By this time, the story that Walter Sickert was somehow ‘Ripper obsessed’ had done the rounds many times. Stephen Knight’s theory went as far as saying that there were many references to the murders in Sickert’s paintings, despite there being scant evidence to support such claims, although Sickert subsequently did a painting of an interior called
Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom
, the only example. Perhaps the genesis of this belief was that he had once told a story that a room in which he had lodged in Mornington Crescent, north-west London, could boast the Ripper as a former occupant (according to the landlady), but Jean Overton Fuller’s theory, in keeping with earliest traditions of suspect-basedRipperology, was derived from hearsay and inventive thinking, as well as further unsubstantiated material which nobody else ever saw. It could be fair to say that the notion of Walter Sickert as the Ripper was a hangover from the ‘royal conspiracy’ theory. Most of the major players in the story had been exonerated of any involvement by careful research since the publication of Stephen Knight’s book, perhaps leaving Sickert as a last-gasp attempt at implicating somebody with friends in high places.
    With that concept worryingly in mind, the field wholeheartedly welcomed the arrival of
The Jack the Ripper A-Z
, an illustrated encyclopedia which attempted to set out as much information about the Whitechapel murders as possible in an easy to reference format. 17 Its authors,