Jack the Ripper Tech

[sdreid]

Graphology was in its infancy in 1888 but an analyst could have at least compared the GSG to the letters and other examples, that is if a photo of the message had been taken.

[sdreid]

There's another investigative tool that could have been tried but I don't believe was and that would be sketch artist renderings of suspicious individuals as per the witnesses. If some looked alike, that would have possibly been important or, for that matter, if they didn't look the same.

[sdreid]

Another investigative tool they had was time-of-death science mostly, in that era, involving body temperature readings. It wasn't too accurate but it was better than nothing in most cases.

They also had a primitive sort of photocopying.

[sdreid]

Although not in common use, they also had the pantelegraph, a primitive wire photo/fax machine.

[sdreid]

Stereoscopic photography was available and would have made crime scene pictures even more beneficial. In fact, I think it's still mostly a missed opportunity today.

[sdreid]

Color photography had also been invented so they could have had 3-D color crime scene photos! - but didn't.

[sdreid]

They also had visual aids like the microscope. I haven't seen that any serious attempt was made to look for hairs, fibers and such though.

[sdreid]

The long drop had been around for quite a while prior to 1888, but sometimes it was so long that the prisoner ended up in two halves under the gallows...odd it is that the USA never quite got the hang of hanging (pun intended) as did the Brits.

There were also some hangings in Canada where the convict's head was torn off. One was a woman around 1938. The hangman apparently made the mistake of believing a female when she told him her weight.

[Rick Mattix]

Black Jack Ketchum was decapitated by the noose when hung for train robbery in New Mexico in, if I remember right, 1902. By some accounts he was charged with "molesting a train" which I've always found kinda humorous. If you can find the old 1949 book Desperate Men by James D. Horan there's a grisly photo of Ketchum's headless body under the scaffold.

[sdreid]

Yes, if I remember correctly, Ketchum gained weight while waiting on an appeal and the hangman neglected to shorten his original drop height calculation to compensate.

[sdreid]

On a somewhat related topic connected to long drop mishaps, there was a report that Edith Thompson's female organs fell out through her vagina when she was hanged in 1923 and that as a result all women who were executed in Britain after that had to wear a preventative device similar to a chastity belt.

[Rick Mattix]

I've read or heard that two or three centuries back burning was the preferred method of execution for women as it was considered indecent to hoist them in the air and expose their privates.

[Rick Mattix]

On another note, when did London police begin photographing suspects? I think the first NYPD mugshots were in the 1880s?

[sdreid]

That's a good question Rick. They weren't apparently doing it in 1888 or we'd have some from the JtR investigation, like Pizer for instance. Oddly, they were photographing insane asylum inmates it seems.

[Magpie]

Justice, if he'd been caught:

In England, you just had hanging recently modernized to the long drop.

The only other "civilized" forms of execution methods used in the world at the time, that I can think of, were the guillotine and the firing squad. The electric chair was well under development but was never used anywhere but The United States and The Philippines.

They would have still been using the Garrotte in Spain at that point, wouldn't they?

edit: Just checked--they used it up until 1974 or so.