Lettering expert Sally Bower believes that in some Ripper letters the writing was disguised by a right-handed person writing with his left hand. It is obvious that the actual Ripper wrote far more of the Ripper letters than he has ever been credited with. In fact, I believe he wrote most of them. In fact, Walter Sickert wrote most of them. Even when his skilled artistic hands altered his writing, his arrogance and characteristic language cannot help but assert themselves.

No doubt there will always be skeptics and critics tainted by self-interest who will refuse to accept that Sickert was a serial killer, a damaged, diabolical man driven by megalomania and hate. There will be those who will argue that it's all coincidence.

As FBI profiler Ed Sulzbach says, "There really aren't many coincidences in life. And to call coincidence after coincidence after coincidence a coincidence is just plain stupid."

Fifteen months after my first meeting with Scotland Yard's John Grieve, I returned to him and presented the case.

"What would you do had you known all this and been the detective back then?" I asked him.

"I would immediately put Sickert under surveillance to try to find where his bolt holes [secret rooms] were, and if we found any, we would get search warrants," he replied as we drank coffee in an East End Indian restaurant.

"If we didn't get any more evidence than what we've now got," he went on, "we'd be happy to put the case before the crown prosecutor."

Chapter Three. The Unfortunates

It is hard to imagine that Walter Sickert did not engage in London's festive activities on the much-anticipated bank holiday of August 6th. For the art lover on a budget, a penny would buy admission into all sorts of exhibits in the squalid East End; for the better off, a shilling would pay for a peek at the masterpieces of Corot, Diaz, and Rousseau in the high-priced galleries on New Bond Street.