A.P. Wolf

[richardnunweek]

Hi,
It actually stands for 'Always Polite'...
that goes without saying.
Richard.

[Cap'n Jack]

Thanks for the kind comments, folks, much appreciated.
I'd blush but the rouge would hide it anyway.
Personally I think my greatest talent as a writer is to sit quietly on a bar stool whilst absorbing brandy like some great sponge, that's as long as you are buying.
When it's my round I sort of fall off the stool and get carried out of the bar, and thrown into the next. I'm able to do this for a week solid.

[diana]

I just finished the book. The reasoning about Cutbush is excellent and the evidence against Michael Kidney seems irrefutable.

My only problem is with the one sided treatment of the Bible, a book that has brought comfort and inspiration and uplifting to millions.

One example: Corrie Ten Boom relates that when imprisoned in a Nazi death camp, the women in her cabin were constantly fighting, constantly at each others throats. Understandable, I suppose as the stress level was extremely high. Corrie smuggled in a Bible and they began reading it aloud. She said the whole atmosphere changed for the better. There was more toleration and more kindness.

The verses quoted were misinterpreted and taken out of context. To be fair, this was not done by A.P. but by the madmen he described. The one in Hebrews which talks about shedding blood for the remission of sins is not telling the reader to go out and kill people. It refers to the sacrifice of Christ who submitted himself to die on a cross that human beings might be redeemed and live. This is apparent when it is read in context.

I for one am not ready to throw out my Bible. I read it every day and to date have murdered nobody.

[Paddy Goose]

Anyone for tea? - Paddy

From Durward St looking north



Vallance Rd and Whitechapel

[perrymason]

Thats a good post Diana, but your opening does speak volumes,...I agree on both points, good arguments made.

I think that AP is to Ripperology a conscience to some degree, and no-one who knows their stuff and has studied long and perhaps also written likes being reminded of what is really possible here. I believe the hardest feeling to achieve for Ripperoligists is satisfaction, and to suggest ideas that are past plausible and into convincing without framing a mad drooling man, unconnected in any sense of the word, as the central figure, is heiracy to some.

I was rude to you AP when we first met, me as Batman, weve come a way since, but I never did apologise for treating you as some lush that needed straightening out. I do now. I still think you are a lush, but an extremely interesting and talented one.

Ive enjoyed learning from you immensely, thanks.

Ok...if Im nice for too long I get a hernia.

Cheers AP, all.

[downonwhores]

analytical method?

Well in my vacant defence I can but quote a god:

'The book is most interesting in that it views the Ripper from a refreshingly new perspective. Mr. Wolf brings to bear data derived from an examination of the twentieth-century serial killer and uses it to construct what it is modern to call a psychological profile of the innominate one. Such latterday practitioners as Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz, Richard Chase, Edward Gein, William Heirens, Joachim Kroll, and Peter Sutcliffe provide useful type-specimens, and the author's unusual slant and provocative theorisings seem to hit home quite convincingly. He disputes the notion of the Ripper as a sex killer. He believes that Elizabeth Stride was killed by her live-in lover Michael Kidney, but would extend the Ripper murders canon to include Martha Tabram, as a kind of dummy run.

Ripperologists (horrid word) in general, and Colin Wilson in particular, come in for some slashing knife-work worthy of the old eviscerator himself. A look at Mr. Wolf's novel analytical methodology is instructive, and can, I think, prove only beneficial to those who may perhaps have hitherto taken too strong an intellectual root in the received mythology.'

When a god speaks it is wise to pay some attention.

His analytical method is based on his opinion not facts. he misuses the words mass murderer to describe jack and ted when they are not. They are serial killers which are totally different. He calls psychology simplistic and has no proof that jack is not sex killer when the evidence proves otherwish. He uses the bible as evidence to prove his theory? He says," most murderers are caught by pure luck rather than good police work" Plus he ignores the facts that serial killers do have a "form" or signature. If he reads Joel Norris Serial Killers, he would know that. He would also know that Tabram was NOT a JTR victim because the forensic evidence shows otherwise.
He calls Rumbelow "lurid. .. armchair Ripperologist" who only includes the photographs of the victims as " superpornography to titilate the discerning reader."
he calls Freud simplistic and jack not a sex murderer when the fact that Jack used a knife a phallic symbol to mutilate and remove the uteri of several victims? How can this not be sexual when Jack is viturally recreating a sexual act? He refers to Wilson's contributions and others as "fictional trivia, pornographic, armchair detectives."
I think Colin Wilson has done a lot for criminology besides Jack the Ripper book and his study on Ted Bundy is wrong. A pair of handcuffs and pantyhose aren't enough to arrest someone for murder yet he thinks this is. What about sexual fetishish? Maybe the police thought he was kinky for having that stuff in his car. Can't fault the police for that.


THis is NOT analytical but pure b.s.

[mac-the-kipper]

Strange how, after 4 pages of posts you are the only person that thinks this way.

[Natalie Severn]

Nevertheless AP"s book builds its case by reminding us of a number of forgotten facts

viz that:

1]Thomas Cutbush "was" [virtually] "named" as "Jack the Ripper" by a British national newspaper,The Sun,in February 1894,and was the only person to have been named in a national newspaper[in the UK] as Jack the Ripper until the 1980"s.

2]Thomas Cutbush "was" named in 1894 by Macnaghten"s memorandum.He was referred to as the "nephew" of Supt Charles Cutbush who was another police chief in Macnaghten"s Scotland Yard.

3]Thomas Cutbush "was" sent to an asylum for the criminally insane,viz Broadmoor in 1891----[unlike Kosminski who was in an institution for those with milder mental problems].


4]Thomas Cutbush did have a history of violence:
-he attacked the maid by holding a knife to her throat.
-he stabbed at least two women in the streets with a Bowie Knife.
-he threw an elderly man downstairs and left him for dead
-he threatened to kill his doctor who he believed was trying to poison him
-he told a young couple he had met in Camden that he wasnt Jack the ripper----all he had done was "lay women out and cut them up"---presumably a reference to his hobby of cutting out the inner organs from the tracings of women"s bodies he had made from the medical books-----

AP reminded us of a young man whose whereabouts at the time of the murders has never been accounted for ,who was named as The Ripper in 1894 by the Sun Newspaper and whose series of violent attacks and stabbings of women with a knife on the streets of london led to him spending the remainer of his life in the secure prison of Broadmoor.

[Celesta]

Thank you, Nats. That was well done. I believe it would be a mistake to discount this seriously disturbed person. Let's also not forget that before the "Ripper murders" some other women were attacked and stabbed, Ida Wilson, etc, possibly Jack warming up, or an independent attacker, who certainly had potential to be just as lethal.


Diana, I also found Corrie Ten Boom and her sister inspirational.

[Natalie Severn]

Thanks Celesta. Thomas Cutbush did have links with Whitechapel.He had worked as a clerk for a tea company in the Minories which leads on from Houndsditch next to Mitre Square---see the photos of Kearly and Tongue warehouses in Durward Street/Bucks Row curtesy of Paddy Goose above --AP told us this and pointed out that Kearly and Tongue-had warehouses in Mitre Square as well as Bucks Row and Vallance Road.
Best
Norma/aka Old Mother Riley

[Cap'n Jack]

Thanks again,folks, for the kind comments.
What amuses me about the 'Myth' is that it doesn't appear to exist. I don't have a copy. I don't know anybody who does. Even the libraries have lost it.
Natalie, do you not find it of abiding interest that Exec. Sup. Charles Henry Cutbush, the head of the Commissioner's Office of Scotland Yard at the time of the Whitechapel Murders; and Dr Bond, working for the Commissioner's Office at the same time, both committed suicide in very dramatic fashion?
Would you not agree it 'tis strange coincidence?

[Natalie Severn]

Yes,AP, and whether it is a simple coincidence or whether there may be a connective thread between the two, it is thought provoking. I would suggest that any of those who witnessed the Ripper"s carnage of Mary Kelly and were of fragile mental health, could have been left with seriously unsettling images of the crime and especially had they been in any way lent on over a "cover up" of some kind and that such a secret could have had a lasting deleterious effect on their mental heath.It would be useful to know a bit more about Dr Bond"s suicide and whether he had ever been friendly with Chief Supt Cutbush.

[The Grave Maurice]

What amuses me about the 'Myth' is that it doesn't appear to exist. I don't have a copy. I don't know anybody who does.

I have a very nice copy. Of course it isn't signed....(hint, hint).

[Robert]

AP, you're forgetting that I too have a very nice copy - and it is signed.

[Sam Flynn]

I once had a copy of a sign. It said "Please refrain from disposing nasal waste on the lavatory wall".