As a psychologist, I read the recent article and letters about the identity of Jack The Ripper with interest (The Argus, December 8).

The Ripper was included in a book of the world's greatest unsolved mysteries I had as a child and I followed the saga until the number of books published on the topic got too many for me to follow.

Initially, the police focused on suspicious characters in the neighbourhood but, as a Ripper publishing industry developed, the theories got increasingly far-fetched.

At first, writers concentrated on people who might have got away with the crimes because, if the police searched them, they had an excuse to carry knives and even for these to be bloodstained.

People such as butchers, barbers, surgeons, even a midwife - Jill The Ripper?

Clearly, most of the people who lived in the East End and had means and opportunity, if not motive, were little-known and it is impossible now to know which of them fitted other aspects of a serial-killer profile.

The early Ripper writers didn't always offer a name, just a type of person.

Later, an obsession developed with the idea the Ripper may have been someone famous - the artist Sickert, Queen Victoria's doctor Sir William Gull and even the queen's grandson, Clarence, have been accused over the years.

I think all these theories are a way of cashing in on the modern cult of celebrity.

The profile shows serial killers are seldom celebrities of any kind. Most operate in areas they know, not normally their immediate neighbourhoods but where they don't stand out.

The East End in 1888 was a desperately poor area. Murder was fairly rare but robbery was common, as was casual violence.

The likelihood that men like Clarence, Gull or Sickert, if motivated to commit murder, would choose to do so in Whitechapel is very low. The killer clearly knew the area very well or he would not have escaped.

There is no contemporary evidence any of the victims knew any of the others or any of them knew one or more of the celebrity suspects.

They were chosen because they were vulnerable and desperate for money and so would go with a stranger into dark corners where no one could observe what happened next.

I'm afraid Patricia Cornwell is wasting her money buying Sickert paintings as part of her search for the Ripper.

Unless she is sufficiently in command of the modern cult of the celeb to be doing it all to publicise a soon-to-be-announced book.

-Peter T Garratt, Cliveden Court, London Road, Brighton