Ripperology: Questioning the Dogma

[Cap'n Jack]

There appears to be a gentle swerve here in viewing these murders, and others, as featuring motives of 'control' and 'power' over the victims... and this is where I always part company with all concerned.
For this type of murder actually involves a loss of control and power, rather than a gain.
It is essentially part of the stereotyped image and dogma to imagine that murdering a woman might give a male individual some sort of pleasurable power or control over the female victim. Men like Colin Wilson have promoted and enforced this myth by comparing serial killers like Jack the Ripper - who had no sexual contact with his victims - to sexual predators like Ted Bundy who took his power and control from his victims by raping them, and then killing them to avoid identification.
This is akin to placing Mars on the planet Earth and then proclaiming it to be the Indian Ocean.

[Bailey]

Hey Cap'n

Not sure how accurate your assessment of Mr Bundy is there - while there was certainly a sexual component to some of his crimes, I believe from memory that it was just that, a component, as opposed to your suggestion that he only killed to cover up for rapes. It's been a while since I read anything on the case, but my understanding is that he frequently killed with no (traditional) sexual component. And even if, as you say, he raped and the killing was secondary, why was he raping in the first place? He was considered an attractive man (don't get it myself, but whatever) and popular with the ladies, so it must have been about something other than just sex. The most commonly considered non-sexual motive for rape, is of course, power and control.

B.

[Limehouse]

There appears to be a gentle swerve here in viewing these murders, and others, as featuring motives of 'control' and 'power' over the victims... and this is where I always part company with all concerned.
For this type of murder actually involves a loss of control and power, rather than a gain.
It is essentially part of the stereotyped image and dogma to imagine that murdering a woman might give a male individual some sort of pleasurable power or control over the female victim. Men like Colin Wilson have promoted and enforced this myth by comparing serial killers like Jack the Ripper - who had no sexual contact with his victims - to sexual predators like Ted Bundy who took his power and control from his victims by raping them, and then killing them to avoid identification.
This is akin to placing Mars on the planet Earth and then proclaiming it to be the Indian Ocean.

I agree that the murderer is in some way out of control within the bounds of normal behaviour and to me this is evident in the amount of anger that is displayed by the killer. I would also agree that rape is most definitely an expression of power and control over a victim. However, in the case of JtR, the fact that the killer had no sexual contact with his victims is irrelevant if, for the killer, normal sexual intercourse is not needed to achieve sexual gratification.

[DarkPassenger]

There appears to be a gentle swerve here in viewing these murders, and others, as featuring motives of 'control' and 'power' over the victims... and this is where I always part company with all concerned.
For this type of murder actually involves a loss of control and power, rather than a gain.

Ripper-type killers are driven by intense psychological need for power in the form of a deep-seated feeling of inadequacy, and the murders, which are indeed the product usually of a loss of control, are built up by this need.

It is essentially part of the stereotyped image and dogma to imagine that murdering a woman might give a male individual some sort of pleasurable power or control over the female victim. Men like Colin Wilson have promoted and enforced this myth by comparing serial killers like Jack the Ripper - who had no sexual contact with his victims - to sexual predators like Ted Bundy who took his power and control from his victims by raping them, and then killing them to avoid identification.
This is akin to placing Mars on the planet Earth and then proclaiming it to be the Indian Ocean.

The Yorkshire Ripper only had sexual contact with one of his 13 victims - Helen Rytka - because he had to; he was forced to go through with the sex because his opportunity to kill was delayed.

Ted Bundy never fully explained his motives, and he cannot be compared against other killers because serial killers are rarely homogenous. Sex killers often do not rape their victims. Ed Kemper, a Californian killer, resolved to kill his rape victims so they couldn't identify them; he ended up killing his victims without raping them at all, because the murder becomes the "sex" to the killer.

Are you denying that serial killers will murder women to gain perverse feelings of power? Seriously? What are you suggesting instead?

[Pinkerton]

Hey DP,

Yeah, that's it exactly. All too many people want to treat the case like it's some work of fiction and propose all sorts of silly plot twists, surprises, cover ups and dramatic narratives to explain the murders. They don't want to look at what we know about actual real-world serial killers. They don't want to be bothered to learn anything about criminology, psychology, history or forensic science. They want to be treated as if they have some sort of special insight without having to commit to serious study or being honest about the evidence. I'm sorry, but someone who doesn't even understand what the term "lust murder" even means isn't in any position to try to argue about it, and so forth and so on.

Anyone can say they are fighting dogma, but most of those who do are just frustrated because their own completely baseless ideas are not treated seriously by anyone with any expertise in the topic. And that's certainly often the case on these boards.

Thanks Dan. Though you sometimes come across as overly pugnacious from time to time you also have the knack for cutting through the clatter. Your post pretty much sums up my feelings towards the subject as well.

Some people on these boards seem to believe that the idea that serial killers are often motivated by sexual-sadism was dreamed up by some kind of hair-brained Freudian concept arrived at through some kind of conceptual "analysis". The truth is in fact less sensational--they INTERVIEWED THE KILLERS at length, going back for decades. The people who did the interviews were not laymen like you and I, they were trained SCIENTISTS who study the mind for a living.

No offense to anyone hear but going with your "gut" or your "personal experience" like Sam's post, or GEORGE BUSH (no offence to Sam intended ) is NOT science. I'll go with actual research and statistics and people who study this phenomenon for a living.

Are there serial killers who aren't sexual sadists? Yes. David Berkowitz comes to mind. Are there serial killers who are "mad"? Absolutely. However they ARE THE MINORITY. Most serial killers get sexual pleasure from hurting and controlling people. They are not "mad" in the conventional sense (schizophrenia, manic-depression, etc). They have personality disorders.

[Ben]

Agreed, Pinkerton, although I'd say Berkowitz can be safely filed under "SSK" too.

[Roy Corduroy]

Here's a motive - Revenge. JtR had syphilis, which made him angry. So he took out his revenge on the prostitutes.

Roy

[Dan Norder]

sexual predators like Ted Bundy who took his power and control from his victims by raping them, and then killing them to avoid identification

You know even less about the Bundy case than you do about the Ripper case, apparently.

Bundy was much more than a rapist who killed his victims so they couldn't testify against him later. He killed because he loved to kill, and he got sexual thrills out of it. He even took body parts from some victims and used them as part of acts of masturbation later.

[Dan Norder]

Thanks Dan. Though you sometimes come across as overly pugnacious from time to time you also have the knack for cutting through the clatter.

Thanks. Yeah, sometimes I'm just grumpy that there so much clatter to cut through and so many people trying to add to it all the time... usually the same people over and over.

[PepeLep]

Bundy was much more than a rapist who killed his victims so they couldn't testify against him later.

I finally have something to contribute!


We know more about Bundy than nearly any other serial killer. He did extensive interviews. My wife owns a taped interview with him that was made just before he was executed where he talked at length about his motivation. When you cut through the clutter, his motives were extremely complex. I haven't seen it in a while, but I must agree wholeheartedly that he was much more than a rapist who killed to cover up his rapes.

Rape was a side issue with Bundy.

[Sam Flynn]

No offense to anyone hear but going with your "gut" or your "personal experience" like Sam's post.

Sam is a psychology graduate of the University of London, Pink - no offence taken, by the way On that basis, my "guts" are perhaps marginally better-informed than most people's "personal experience", and may at least be on a par with the more charismatic 'tecs - whose ideas about serial killers seem to carry a flickering torch for the psychoanalytic tradition.

Whether the Resslers and Douglases of this world realise that or not is of little consequence, but I'm sure that qualified psychologists/psychiatrists do. Unfortunately, there are some psychologists and psychiatrists who have pointed out, rightly, that psychoanalysis was founded on observations of a very small number of patients/subjects and, typically, little or no experimental controls or statistical scrutiny was applied to the limited data produced.

So much for the bad old days and, although some social science experiments even today are similarly encumbered, it has to be said that, due to the extensive interviews with serial killers carried out by some researchers, the problem of having small numbers of subjects has been alleviated to a large extent. There is always the problem of "smart-arse" subjects faking it for effect, of course - witness endless "insanity" pleas, or Bundy's sick-making contrition over his relationship with pornography - so one has to question the objectivity of the data themselves.

Even if this problem didn't exist, another issue lies with the interpretation of the data which, to my eyes at least, seems still to be couched within a "traditional" pop-psychology framework. It's hardly surprising, therefore, to discover in police offender profiles the concepts of attachment, loss and deprivation cropping up with remarkable frequency. If those (essentially Bowlbyan) constructs don't fit, then there are always the good old Freudian standbys of Oedipus, fantasy and symbolism to fall back on.

This is not to deny that these interpretations, or the intuitions upon which they are formed, are wrong in every aspect. Far from it, I'm sure that these partly explain a serial killer's behaviour in some cases - but they might only ever form a part, and quite possibly a very small part, of the psychological makeup of all such killers.

To believe otherwise is to ignore the fact that organic mental disorders or substance abuse can lead to extremes of behaviour. It is also a denial of the fact that the majority of normal people, whose backgrounds (familial and social) are just as deprived as those of the minority who are killers, and whose life experiences might be just as extreme, do not commit serial murders.

The problem with the application of profiling in the matter of JTR is that it's often used to make a given suspect conform to a template, to justify bold assertions about his (usually unknowable) history, and from that to "explain" his behaviour. As there is no instruction manual on how to construct a serial killer, trying to reverse-engineer the Ripper, and using a profile in an attempt to legitimise the exercise, can only be an act of ingenious speculation.

It cannot make it "right" except perhaps, and only perhaps, in giving a very coarse-grained view - e.g. statistical patterns revealed at the demographic/sociological level. The psychology beneath it is a minefield at the best of times.

[Natalie Severn]

Thanks for this post Sam,a really splendid contribution .It fully and properly addresses the question without bias or dogma, while acknowledging the several schools of thought on the matter.Great stuff.

[Jon Guy]

Flawed data ?

Hello Sam

Do you think that the information gleaned from these extensive interviews is also flawed due to the fact that these interviewees have been caught ?
This may be a poor analogy but to study the true nature of the tiger it has to be studied in the wild, rather than a cage in a zoo ? Or am I talking shy#e

[Bailey]

Probably a very valid point there, Jon. Alas, like tigers, serial killers "in the wild" can be tricky to find and study... And unlike tigers, if found, they are best caged ASAP

B.

[Cap'n Jack]

Yes, well done, Sam, old boy, a truly brilliant post.
You managed to capture the inarticulation I always have on this subject.