A BEST-selling author is convinced she has identified Jack the Ripper – thus exonerating a Dorset man who had long been one of the prime suspects.

Patricia Cornwell has written her second book on the subject, presenting new evidence for her theory that artist Walter Sickert was the Whitechapel murderer.

Many had suspected the Ripper was Montague Druitt, whose body was recovered from the Thames on New Year’s Eve 1888 – shortly after the fifth and final Ripper murder.

Druitt, whose grave is in Wimborne Minster cemetery, was the son of an eminent surgeon, and was damned by comments in a memorandum by Inspector Melville Macnaghten of the Metropolitan Police.

The inspector wrote after Druitt’s death: “From private information I have little doubt that his own family suspected this man of being the Whitechapel murderer. It was alleged that he was sexually insane.”

Patricia Cornwell, whose first book on the case was published 15 years ago, commissioned scientific analysis of letters said to have been written by the Ripper to the police. Two of the ‘Ripper’ letters and three of Walter Sickert’s were from the same run of only 24 sheets of paper, she discovered.

She found Sickert visited Cornwall around the time that a guest house’s visitor book there was vandalised with sexually crude inscriptions and the signature “Jack the Ripper, Whitechapel”.

She also hired a team of experts including an art conservator who established that certain details on the Ripper letters were created with paintbrushes and an art historian who established that some of the drawings in the Ripper letters were sophisticated woodcuts.

But critics have pointed out that most, or all, of the Jack the Ripper letters are commonly considered to have been hoaxes, so the evidence might at best identify Sickert as one of the hoaxers.

The detective who led the Ripper enquiry was Frederick Abberline, who was born in Blandford and rose to the rank of chief inspector with the Metropolitan Police. He retired to Bournemouth in 1910 and died in 1929.

His grave in Bournemouth’s Wimborne Road cemetery went unmarked until 2007, when a ceremony was attended by senior officers from the Metropolitan Police and historians.

At the ceremony to bless the headstone, Father Robin Harger, vicar of St Stephen’s and St Augustin’s churches, remembered the five East End women whose murderer Abberline had sought to bring to justice.

Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert will be published in hardback by Thomas & Mercer on Tuesday, February 28.