Peter T Garratt, taking a psychologist's view of the unknown serial killer Jack The Ripper (The Argus, December 26), surely arrives at a conclusion of sound common sense.

The likelihood that the culprit was anyone other than a deranged nobody - perhaps with a modicum of surgical expertise - is slim in the extreme.

There is one point I should like to add to my original letter (Letters, December 12). It seems to me that Patricia Cornwell must be just a tad arrogant - or else the manipulator of a cynical marketing ploy - to conclude that, in a case which has defeated the best brains for more than a century, she has now miraculously come up with a 100 per cent watertight solution.

Her so-called evidence, if she has any, should be consigned to the dustbin unread.

Walter Sickert was wildly eccentric and got more so in later life, as Marjorie Lilly's affectionate 1971 book of reminiscences about him confirms.

For example, he kept a large red piece of cloth in a corner of his studio to spur him on with his painting whenever he felt like slacking. But a history of eccentricity is hardly sufficient to make him the scourge of the East End in 1888.

-Roy Braden, Pevensey Road, Worthing