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She was born Patricia Daniels in Miami, Florida. Her ex-husband is Charles Cornwell. She is a descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Cornwell has been involved in a continuing, self-financed search for evidence to support her theory that painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. She published Jack the Ripper: Case Closed in 2002 to much controversy, especially within the British art world, where Sickert's work is admired, and also among ripperologists, whom she criticizes as sick and disgusting for their interest in the killings.
She contends Sickert had the psychological profile of a killer. She asserts that he was unable to have intercourse because his penis was disfigured at birth or through some accident. The killings coincide with the marriage of Sickert's close friend, which she claims provided the spark which exacerbated his awareness of his purported disabilities and ignited a latent anger.
Cornwell cites Sickert's artistic genius as useful for crafting the Ripper's letters, disguising handwriting and varying sketching styles. She also feels that the letters contain specific information related to crimes, and as such are unlikely to be from any other than the Ripper. She also points to Sickert paintings, some of which show women in prostrate poses Cornwell claims are similar to victims at their crime scenes.
In recent speeches, Cornwell says that new evidence has come to light since her book. Paper manufacture experts now assert that reams of paper supposedly used by Jack the Ripper to write several letters to Scotland yard and paper purchased by Sickert's mother bear the same small-press watermark. She also claims that there are matches in the cutter's marks, which are a result of the rough cutting of each quire (or small package) for packaging. A 'quire' was usually of 24 sheets.
All in all, Cornwell claims that the Ripper wrote hundreds of letters and killed almost that many people over the years. She blames almost every unsolved murder that happened in the London area from 1885 until his death on the Ripper, whom she asserts must be Sickert.
Ripperologists and other critics of her theory point out that most, if not all, of the Ripper letters are considered hoaxes by all other authorities, so trying to prove that Sickert wrote one or more of them doesn't prove that he killed anyone. The evidence she claims supports the idea that Sickert had a disfigured penis also supports the more accepted theory that he had a fistula in his anus. Details in the letters and supposedly seen in the paintings she claims only the killer would know were published in newspapers and a book released in France. Sickert could have easily gotten ahold of the book in question, as he also lived in France off and on. In fact, evidence shows that he was probably in France on the nights of several of the Ripper murders.
Critics also note that Cornwell admits that she did not have a theory about the murders until about a year before her book came out and is convinced that the first name mentioned to her as a possible suspect must be the one who really did it. They note that, unlike authors of popular crime fiction, criminal investigators generally don't get to pick the person whodunnit before they do the research.
In 2000, Cornwell successfully obtained a preliminary injunction against a Dr. Leslie Sachs, who had been disseminating outlandish claims on the Internet that Cornwell's then-forthcoming novel, The Last Precinct, was a plagiarism of his own book, The Virginia Ghost Murders. Reports by neutral observers indicate that the resemblance between the two works, if any, is extremely weak and certainly coincidental.
Sachs failed to comply with the injunction, fled the country, and continued his Internet-based campaign of harassment against Cornwell.
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