Yours truly..?

The case has never been solved, although many Victorians, both famous and obscure, have been advanced as possible suspects over the years. The possible culprits have included a barber, a doctor, a woman, a member of the royal circle (namely the Duke of Clarence) and a well known artist.

Now, top fiction writer Patricia Cornwell is certain that the artist, Walter Sickert, was the true villain of the piece.

Her interest in Jack the Ripper began when she was invited by John Grieve, then Deputy Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, to visit the scenes around Whitechapel and Spitalfields, where the Ripper had murdered his victims. She realised that modern forensic methods might throw new light on the Ripper's identity and immediately started working on the case.

Cornwell gathered a team of experts from both Britain and the United States, and together they have helped produce evidence, using advanced techniques such as state-of-the-art DNA testing on various materials, computer enhancement of watermarks and expert examinations of hand-writing paper, inks and other relics.

The best result came from a letter written by the Ripper that yielded a single donor DNA sequence, specific enough to eliminate 99 per cent of the population as the person who licked the adhesive gum on the stamp. This same DNA sequence turned up on another Ripper letter and two Walter Sickert letters.

On presenting her conclusions to John Grieve, she learned that had the investigators of the time been presented with the facts she has unearthed, her suspect would definitely have been arrested, and would probably have faced trial.

Cornwell's investigations into the life of Sickert reveal that the painter was a man who enjoyed playing many parts, having begun his career as an actor. He took pleasure in disguises and was charming, yet emotionally detached. His obsessional interest in crime scenes did not strike any of his contemporaries as unusual.

But as Patricia Cornwell says: "The five young prostitutes have a right to have justice after 113 years."

Her first crime novel Postmortem (1990), marked a dramatic departure from her first published work. A Time for Remembering (1983), was the biography of Ruth Bell Graham, wife of the evangelist Billy Graham. Cornwell's debut as a fiction writer was also the introduction of a female medical examiner as protagonist and storyteller and since then, she has written a string of bestsellers featuring Dr Kay Scarpetta, the intrepid Chief Medical Examiner of the Commonwealth of Virginia: Body of Evidence (1991), All That Remains (1992), Cruel and Unusual (1993), The Body Farm (1994), From Potter's Field (1995), Cause of Death (1996), Unnatural Exposure (1997), Point of Origin (1998), Black Notice (1999) and The Last Precinct (2000).

Today, the adventures of Cornwell's fictional heroine are translated into 24 languages and published in 56 countries.

Patricia Carroll Daniels was born in Miami, Florida, on June 9, 1956, the second of Sam and Marilyn ("Pat") Daniels' three children. Her parents' marriage began to collapse when she was five, and two years later her mother moved to Montreal, North Carolina (the hometown of Ruth and Billy Graham), taking Patricia and her two brothers with her. Following graduation from the local high school (where she played tennis on the boys' team and never lost a match), she briefly attended King College in Tennessee and then transferred to Davidson College in North Carolina. There, she supported herself with work-study jobs, majored in English, wrote for the school's newspaper and its literary magazine, and met her future husband, Dr Charles Cornwell, an English professor.

Even before she graduated from Davidson in the spring of 1979, Cornwell had begun working as a clerk at the Charlotte Observer. She soon began writing feature articles on a regular basis, and within a few months she was assigned the police beat. On June 14, 1980, she and Charles Cornwell were married in Davidson. The following summer, they moved to Richmond, Virginia, where he entered seminary and she began writing the biography of Ruth Bell Graham.

By late 1988, when the Cornwells agreed to an amicable separation (they were divorced the following year), the aspiring young writer's future seemed bleak. Two fellow writers came to her rescue: Edna Buchanon helped her find an agent, and Sara Ann Freed told her to make Scarpetta the main character and to write about what she saw daily in her work at the morgue and on the scene as a volunteer police officer.Eventually, Postmortem -- rejected by seven major publishing houses -- was on the shelves and devoured by the public.

This month sees the publication of her investigation into the Whitechapel murders. But will our fascination with the killings finally be laid to rest? Or, like our fascination with the Titanic disaster, will we be speculating on the killer and victims another 100 years from today?