Ripperology: Questioning the Dogma

[Natalie Severn]

Ben,---please can I make a plea for YOU to get your facts right.
See page 480 and 481 Jack the Riper Source book by Stewart Evans and Keith Skinner regarding a synopsis of the theories of Dr Brownfield"s and Dr Phillip" s findings re the ripper "having studied the theory of strangulation"--- and the avoidance of blood spurt.There are several other examples of the doctors statements supporting what I wrote which can easily be found in the same book,but which I will dig out for you if need be.It is profoundly misleading to state "only one doctor" specifically implicated a member of his own profession.There was a consensus among doctors and the medical journal The Lancet supported it,that the Ripper appeared to have had medical /surgical skills.

regarding Dr Shipman,you can think what you like Dr Shipman was not a poisoner.This is reknowned for its slowness.Shipman"s method of killing was IMMEDIATE and involved no pain.

-the point about the anaesthesia before death is that he KNEW HOW to avoid
noise and KNEW HOW to bring about death quickly and without a racket.Thats the point I was making.He knew how to kill with minimal fuss,just as Dr Shipman did.


Poisoning,by the way is very protracted,agonising and was in no way comparable with the swift killing Dr Shipman made with Sister Morphine!

[Ben]

I'm talking about the doctors who examained the bodies and gave evidence at the inquest, Norma. Of these, only Phillips stated that it had to have been a doctor, just it was apparently only Phillips who made the bizarre suggestion that Eddowes and Chapman were killed by different people. As far as the doctors who actually worked on the ripper case went, Doc-the-Ripper was certainly a minority-endorsed theory.

If any of the ripper victims were strangled, it was probably done to minimize noise levels, having learned from experience on the job (Wilson? Millwood?) that direct attacks with the knife were guaranteed to result in the victim screaming and the killer having to flee. No "theory" to study, just learning from experience, as other serial killers do.

What I find rather bizarre is that you've criticised my comparisons with serial killers in the past - prostitute killers, and serial knife mutilators - but for some reason think that Shipman is a better comparison study! You say Shipman wasn't a poisoner - wrong. Of course he was a poisoner; irrefutably so. A poison is a substance that causes illness of death, and Shipman's methods more that fit the bill in that regard.

[Natalie Severn]

Dr Shipman was NOT a poisoner.

This is ridiculous,Ben.
Poison kills SLOWLY.Dr Shipman killed QUICKLY/rapidly by lethal injection.If someone is executed by lethal injection in the States,reports dont say "The prisoner was executed by poisoning -they use the correct and specific terminology,they say the prisoner was "executed by lethal injection".
Moreover the speed of death was actually hugely significant in the way Shipman chose to kill as he was able to enjoy watching the process of death take place and complete itself within minutes of his injections.Roughly the same time the Ripper had to accomplish the task he set himself.
I can see you intend derailing the thread so maybe I"ll leave it for now Ben.

[Natalie Severn]

Limehouse,
I hadn"t heard that Shipman gained sexual release from his murders but maybe he did.
Apparently he watched his mother die of cancer,after receiving strong morphine injections to control pain. Shipman was allegedly very attached to his mother and she died in his presence when he was just 17 years old.You wonder about the Ripper and his mother with his interest in wombs and what not.But I would disagree fundamentally that the Ripper was any less controlling than Shipman,or any less interested in observing elderly, frail women completely within his power, both as he killed them and when he saw them lying dead on the ground before him.

[Ben]

If you introduce an alien substance into the human body with the intention of causing illness of death, you are poisoning them, Norma.

Ergo, you're a poisoner.

It doesn't matter how slowly or quickly death resulted from the harmful substance. Harold Shipman introduced substances into human beings that caused death.

He poisoned people.

He was a poisoner.

I can see you intend derailing the thread

By responding directly to the points you raised? Yep, obviously all my fault...

[Jeff Leahy]

Hi all

I’ve been following this thread with some interest and the one key point that I feel is being forgotten is the uniqueness of the Jack the Ripper murders.

If we could actually point a finger at one particular factor. Be that a mental condition; schizophrenia, sociopath, psychopath etc.

Or drugs: Alcohol, barbs, LSD, etc etc

Or social conditions. Murdered family, loss of father, loss of mother, etc act

Or perhaps Genetics’ deformed brain, enlarged areas of brain etc.

With any of these factors, if they were actually responsible, surely we would have other examples of similar crimes over the last one hundred and twenty years.

At least one other example where women were strangled, lowered to the ground and their throats cut, their sexual organs attacked (in a frenzied manor) their faces cut away and finally the flesh torn from their thigh bone.

However there are very few cases that even come close to this crime.

There simply is NO historical pattern.

If say schizophrenia, alone were responsible, given the number of reported cases of schizophrenia, we would simply expect more or at least other, similar crimes.

There are none.

So what we can ascertain from the Ripper crimes is that a unique set of circumstance must have come together to have created the conditions in which such a killer could have formed and operated. A very rare set of conditions that appear to have NO exact correlation, only a rare set of circumstance where similar criteria have lead to serial killings.

In short gentleman I’m suggesting that the very lack of similar crimes, to those committed by Jack the Ripper, over 120 years period would suggest A. That no 'one' factor can account for the crimes and B. that the circumstance in which contributing factors lead to the practice of such crimes was very unusual/rare indeed.

Otherwise we would expect other similar crimes to have taken place?

While I believe some factors may have been responsible for such conditions. I don’t believe in it self any single factor could have created JtR.

One off freak event./conditions

Pirate

[perrymason]

I have read several reports that the Ripper is said to have strangled his victims before cutting their throats and that this accounts for the relatively small amount of blood (or spirting anyway) at the scene of the outdoor murders. If it is true that he strangled his victims first, then the stabbing and slashing become particularly important - being post mortem and definitely something the killer 'needed' to do in order to satisfy his aims.

Hi Limehouse,

I think that is an excellent point above, that the act of murder was a faciltator for his desires, not a culmination of them. I think he choked them myself, maybe even punched one, I believe more for quick compliancy and keeping them quiet than for blood concerns, when he cuts the throats they are semi or unconscious on the ground, and he just twists the head and directs the spray away. The fence at Hanbury is a good example of that.

I think the post mortem aspect is the key with the mutilations, and frankly one of the only ways that people who see Mary Kelly as a Ripper victim could reconcile her massive amount of cuts and slices. In that he wallowed in the glut when he had an opportunity to do so...indoors.

If you look at the first 4 murders, it is very possible with what evidence there is that he may not have even used a knife until they were "handled"....subdued and compliant. Which makes his cuts all the more interesting, because the vast majority of knife wounds are not intended to cause immediate death. They are.....to extract organs.....faciltate his fantasies....deface the corpse...as part of his gender anger or confusion....who knows.

Best regards all.

[Natalie Severn]

Staying with the C5

Hi Michael,
As I accept that Stride and Kelly were most probably Ripper victims,I agree with your conclusion, that given the opportunity ,he wallowed in the glut as you put it.And ofcourse ,that no similar murders took place afterwards.
But staying with my understanding of his method of "subdue", I believe it to be of much significance here.
To be even clearer about this:
there appears to have been planning in the "initial" stages of the murders-ie in ensuring their silence and his own "invisibility ",and he appeared to have taken care in all 5 cases to make sure there was minimal fight back,if any at all.
So we may conclude that he took care to
a] avoid being captured-despite the risk taking evident in all C five cases.
b]and that the care he took indicated him having specific knowledge regarding
the carotid artery and its function.
You wrote he simply turned the blood spurt away from him.That statement is NOT actually supported by the crime scene evidence that the examining doctors wrote about.In the case of Annie Chapman,[I am writing from memory here],the fence had some "blood smears" but not the great "gush of blood" that would occur from arterial spray.
So the Ripper KNEW about the functioning of the arteries,and how to subdue his victims, before the murder of Polly Nichols ,either because he had murdered previously and had learnt "on the job" which is actually unlikely to have been sufficient experience, or because he had acquired that knowledge through medical research or training or through being trained to kill in one of the services such as the army or possibly the navy.He could also have been a butcher,though the method of subdue for a human being is slightly different from other mammals.
There were other indications that he knew very well how to swiftly cut throats,there was no hacking,in four of the five cases ,there was just a deep clean cut from left to right.The exception to this was Elizabeth Stride-which was the case where a doctor at her inquest considered whether her scarf
had been used as a tourniquet,AS HE CUT HER THROAT,judging from the frayed edging of that scarf.


What followed ,in four of the five cases I refer to,was indeed butchery.And you are right ,that this appears to have been his ultimate objective .And this is what allows so many to consider JtR as a sexual serial killer.But to get from a to b he used knowledge and skill.It was only when he was once there that he let loose.
However, despite what "appears" to be the case,he may not actually have been a sexual serial killer---he could have been "hearing voices" leading him to delude himself that he was receiving specific "commands"from above as to how and what to mutilate.

Jeff"s post above is very apt in this regard.We still need to re-examine numbers of factors surrounding the murders that were unique to the time and place and society of the series ,before placing them in a category defined by 21st century profilers .

Best Wishes
Norma

[Ben]

and that the care he took indicated him having specific knowledge regarding the carotid artery and its function.

No it doesn't, Norma.

You've assumed that if strangulation did occur, it must have had something to do with some complicated "theory of strangulation", but you didn't acknowledge the possibility I suggested earlier that he strangled or suffocated his victims to prevent screaming. That, I suggest, is a far more common reason for subduing murder victims that way, and introduces the possibility that JTR discovered this "trick" after a few botched jobs. Again, Millwood and Wilson spring to mind.

If that was what prompted him to strangle some of his victims, there's absolutely no evidence that he "knew about the functioning of the arteries".

Silent and invisible? Again, I very strongly disagree and fear that this sort of reasoning leads us back to top hats and fog. If Stride was a ripper victim as you believe, then her probable assailant was the very opposite of "silent" and "invisible". Chapman and Nichols may have been quiet, but certainly not to the extent you seem to be envisaging, and the chances of the killer being seen were very high indeed.

either because he had murdered previously and had learnt "on the job" which is actually unlikely to have been sufficient experience

This is just nonsense.

The majority of serial killers learn "on the job". They hone and practice and, unfortunately, often progress from there. Very rarely will you find a serial killer with a ready-made, finely-tuned MO who pulls off the perfect murder first time around. Why wouldn't earlier murders have constituted sufficient experience? If he stabbed his earlier victims, only to have them scream and force him to abandon the murder, wouldn't it seem a logical and obvious progression to try strangling his next victim in order to prevent them screaming?

There were other indications that he knew very well how to swiftly cut throats,there was no hacking,in four of the five cases ,there was just a deep clean cut from left to right.

Norma, Chapman and Kelly were nearly decapitated, with Eddowes faring not much better. That cannot possibly have been acheived by one "clean cut". Stride's cut was cleaner, but even that was only sufficient to sever the carotid artery partially, which hardly screams medical genius.

"We still need to re-examine numbers of factors surrounding the murders that were unique to the time and place and society of the series ,before placing them in a category defined by 21st century profilers"

So why do you reject almost all comparisons with other serial killers unless it's someone who had medical knowledge like Shipman, who otherwise doesn't compare to JTR at all? He wasn't from the "time and place and society" of the series, but for some reason it's okay to draw paralells with him. It's as though you're rejecting "21st century profilers" unless you can tweak it so that it somehow supports the sort of ripper you want.

Best regards,
Ben

[DarkPassenger]

Nat, you miss the crucial difference;

Shipman's crimes were immediate and painless for the victims,

JTR's crimes were quick and easy for the killer! Shipman is a totally different breed of serial killer than the Ripper. It's like comparing Colin Ireland and Peter Sutcliffe. Totally incompatible.

[Fisherman]

Ben writes:

"he strangled or suffocated his victims to prevent screaming. That, I suggest, is a far more common reason for subduing murder victims that way, and introduces the possibility that JTR discovered this "trick" after a few botched jobs."

A hundred percent agreed, Ben. I think that the throat-cutting was primarily led on by the fact that he needed to ensure silence. The fact that it also left the victim dead and that it helped to bleed the body off were very useful fringe benefits, but he cut for silence more than anything else, the way I see it. No silence = an obvious risk that he did not get to open the women up, and that was what made him tick.

The best!
Fisherman

[DarkPassenger]

Shipman was all about peace and pain-free passing. The Ripper was all about slashing the crap out of "whores" without being caught.

[Ben]

The fact that it also left the victim dead and that it helped to bleed the body off were very useful fringe benefits

Precisely, Fisherman!

Fringe benefits and by-products that he may not have even anticipated.

Best wishes,
Ben

[Jeff Leahy]

Ben writes:
"he strangled or suffocated his victims to prevent screaming. That, I suggest, is a far more common reason for subduing murder victims that way, and introduces the possibility that JTR discovered this "trick" after a few botched jobs."
A hundred percent agreed, Ben. I think that the throat-cutting was primarily led on by the fact that he needed to ensure silence. The fact that it also left the victim dead and that it helped to bleed the body off were very useful fringe benefits, but he cut for silence more than anything else, the way I see it. No silence = an obvious risk that he did not get to open the women up, and that was what made him tick.
The best! Fisherman

Yes I'd agree with your logic fisherman, especially if you factor in Tabram, who clearly met a much messier end than the others, possibly even regained conciousness during the attack.

But I think you should be careful with the 'Down on whores' line, which is reminiscent of a line from a letter that was probably Hoaxed. Though I think it would be strange to suggest that the murders were an act of love, but who knows what was in the killers mind?

As I've stated its not as though we have lots of similar cases to go by, which is why Psychological theorizing is so difficult. Though I'm not stating impossible, just difficult.

Pirate

[DarkPassenger]

Similar cases to JTR are...

Steve Wright. Five murders, a short space of time, over a short area. In that way we can pretty much rule out the idea that the victims of JTR were killed for reasons other than serialist motives - they may well have known each other but it's irrelevent.

Peter Sutcliffe. He killed one victim indoors during his killing spree because that's where the victim took her clients for business, not because he felt it was "too hot" outside or because he felt he wanted to rip someone completely. That's why I think Jack killed his victims where they took him, not the other way round. Plotting the pick-up points of the victims (if possible) may be a better idea for geographical profiling.

Jack the Stripper. The killer committed suicide before being caught, and the victims had some similarities with Jack's - teeth knocked out for example.