Belief

[Simon Wood]

Hi Rob,

Are we really expected to believe that in a knee-jerk reaction to the JtR correspondence the police immediately blurted out to the world a possible clue the size of the Ritz without giving careful consideration to the consequences?

Surely nobody at Scotland Yard was that naive or stupid.

But they might just have been that duplicitous.

Regards,

Simon

[protohistorian]

Quote from Bolo on the usefulness of the Jack stereotype, "It narrows down our view because it cements the idea of a single, male and probably quite mad killer of prostitutes. Looked at in that light, the Jack the Ripper label and the inspiration behind it is only slightly above the level of the misleading LVP chauvinism that "surely no Englishman could have done it"...


Right on my man! I believe the stereotype is not a neutral value in terms of accurate understanding, but a corrosively negative one. No one can assert it has not colored the study of these crimes for a century. Dave

[chudmuskett]

Hi All,

In the absence of any evidence to support the 1888 existence of JtR, "the fiend in human form", what are your reasons in 2010 for wanting to believe in him?

Regards,

Simon

The absence of evidence would suggest to me that the case wasn't that important to the police of the day. It was only the pressure from the media and the public that drove this case ahead, I dont believe for one minute that it was about catching the killer, it was more about trying to keep a public image. As for "believing in him" I dont have faith in anything that is shadowed in mystery and full of holes.

[richardnunweek]

Hi.
My Humble opinion, is simply this.
I believe the killer of the women known as the C5, or even C6, was a man of middle age 45 -50 years. of stoutish build, that preyed on women of virtue, after observing them soliciting.
Tabram . After observing her antics with soldier boy, proberly after being active in George yard .
Nichols- Proberly observed her, attempting to solicit. near to the London Hospital, and followed her into Bucks Row.
Annie Chapman.-watched her solicit outside number 29, before moving in on a weiry Annie, after her punter had left.
Stride- watched her being approached by several men that evening, and followed her into Berner street[ proberly Broad shoulders]
Eddowes- Watched her, and sailor boy appear on friendly terms[ proberly not so] before following her into Mitre Square.
Mary Kelly- observed Astracan, enter Millers court, and waited his opportunety.which did not present itself until the morning...
Jack was the middle aged man seen by Maxwell at 845am talking to Mjk.
We all know that the name'' Jack the Ripper' was a name invented by the press. but the whitechapel killer did exist...
Regards Richard.

[robhouse]

Hi Simon,

"Are we really expected to believe that in a knee-jerk reaction to the JtR correspondence the police immediately blurted out to the world a possible clue the size of the Ritz without giving careful consideration to the consequences?"

What consequences? I think by the beginning of October, it was no secret that there was a lone killer roaming the east end. The only real consequence of publishing the letter was that it forever dubbed the unknown killer with the name Jack the Ripper. But I do not see how revealing the letters via the press really hampered the police enquiries... except perhaps for unleashing a tidal flood of similar faked letters.

I am sure the police did consider the consequences, but concluded that it would be the best course of action to publish the letter. I think in their position, I would have done the same.

RH

[Simon Wood]

Hi Rob,

What consequences?

In widely publicizing the JtR correspondence the cops unleashed the world's first international media frenzy. Hardly a suitable climate in which to conduct a murder investigation.

Regards,

Simon

[robhouse]

Hi Simon,

But wasn't there already a media frenzy by the time the police released that? Admittedly the police must have been cognizant that if they publicized the letter it may have caused a sort of panic... but there was already a panic. I stand by my theory here. The police were grasping at straws and following up whatever lead they had... they would have weighed their option and decided it was worth it to try.

Rob

[caz]

Jack by any other name

And I fully believe that, by 2015, mention of "Jack the Ripper" will be met with guffaws and cries of, "How could people have ever fallen for that one?"

Hi Lynn,

Remind me what people without your intuition have ‘fallen for’, because nobody I know believes that whoever mutilated those women had Jack Ripper on their birth certificate.

Some say he didn't kill Eddowes. Why? Because it looked like a rough imitation of another? When did murder become a perfectionist's art? If coupled with the possiblility that Berner st. was a failure, isn't it possible that rage might have weighed upon the success of this? However, I have yet to see this to be tested at the multi-jack camp.

Just quit with the common sense, Corey, it has no business here. They won’t like you naming them the ‘multi-jack camp’ either. It shows up the fly in the ointment. They seem to prefer the ‘no-jacks’. There was no ripping in Berner Street, but it beats me why it matters if there was no Jack anywhere.

...(a) when the name "Jack the Ripper" first came to light... It was after C1 and C2.

(b)how that name came to light...through the post, from an anonymous correspondant, and

(c)from whence it came...purportedly from an enterprising pressman.

Hi Phil,

The name was first written before C3, but didn’t come to light - as in publicised - until after C4. Nobody knows for certain who signed the name, but then nobody has a clue who inspired it by committing C1 and C2. Assuming we already have two individuals here, acting independently, then whoever committed C3 and C4 similarly had no idea that the mould they were about to fit was labelled Jack the Ripper.

It’s one thing to accept without question that an enterprising journalist made the lucky guess that another ripping would follow C2, and follow within days of his naming the culprit; it’s quite another to believe that this culprit never killed again, and that the ‘enterprising’ part of the equation (with or without the quick-witted follow-up postcard) relied wholly on at least one new killer coming on the scene - a mutilator - at the right point to push all the right buttons. Enterprising is as enterprising does. What would have been so enterprising about giving a fancy name to a man who killed twice at most, if C3, 4 and 5 had never happened?

What, not whom, is "Jack the Ripper"?

Should Lynn Cates in his arguably well reasoned and plausible surmising be correct, and Ischenscmid be the killer of C1 and C2, and that the general view of Liz Stride's killer not being the serial killer known as "Jack the Ripper" now serioiusly considered, then we are left with the stunning thought (for some) that there are at least 3 killers for the C5.

It makes the great mystery a myth. It makes "Jack the Ripper" a myth. That, I quietly suggest, would not be pleasing to an awful lot of people and their "beliefs" towards one lone serial killer stalking Whitechapel and Spitalfields, murdering and disembowelling the poorest of women.

It seems obvious to me that the local population would think that it was one madman. The press promoted it. The police promoted it. But what if this is not true? Then the belief in the "Jack the Ripper" as we have been told and presented for many years, is quite simply, a myth.

The 'what' is easy - it’s how that anonymous author described what everyone was already aware of: murder that was not ‘the norm’. The 'who' was never going to be simple, especially with no discernible links between the killer in each case and his victim, and no definable motive. Why the surprise at no solution if three or more of these women were attacked by a stranger out of sheer cussedness?

With all due respect, Lynn won’t make a myth of the ‘great mystery’ until he can squeeze the large lady into her costume and get her singing. Chucking C3 out with the bathwater is the easy bit; C4 and C5 can’t be flushed away simply to keep a new theory afloat. How does Lynn reconcile the remarkable similarity between the ‘flap’ cutting of C2 and C5, for example? A moment of expert copycatting in with all the inexpert ones?

I don’t think the local population was made up entirely of shi*-for-brains; the police were not generally popular, and those who were capable of reading the papers were capable of adding a pinch of salt here and there too.

It gathered it's own momentum after being given a hefty shove by certain people. Newspapermen, police, vigilance members and various other individuals included. All adding fuel to the fire. And all the time the ordinary working man and woman and the poorest of the poor were frightened out of their skins!

This hefty shove came early on though, didn’t it? No murders after Tabram, no momentum. The fire started with her, but the only fuel that could have kept it going was the flesh of new murder victims. Anderson would have agreed with you about everyone in the district being frightened needlessly. But he appreciated that the poorest of the poor unfortunate women had every reason to be frightened while out on the streets alone at night. The women murdered after Tabram should have been frightened out of their skins.

Love,

Caz
X

[c.d.]

As always Caz, I can't decide if I am more impressed by your wit or your wisdom.

Plus your punctuation and grammar ain't bad either.

c.d.

[caz]

If it was true that Dear Boss and Saucy Jacky, the sources of the name Jack the Ripper, were journalistic hoaxes [vide Anderson and Littlechild], then a murderer styling himself as such did not exist. But the top echelons in Whitehall did not make public their suspicions about the nature of this correspondence. Instead, they plastered facsimile posters of the letter and postcard across the city and encouraged belief amongst their divisional rank and file in the wholly mythical Jack.

The Times, 20th October 1888—

" . . . Last night, when the policemen on night duty were drawn up in their respective station-yards, preparatory to going on their beats, the last letter sent by "Jack the Ripper" was read over to them. It was pointed out that the writer intimated his intention of committing further murders last night, and the necessity for special vigilance was impressed upon the police."

Hi Simon,

I’m with Rob House on this one. Intent can only be guessed, and you are guessing that the intention here was to encourage belief in a wholly mythical Jack, on the part of an all-knowing Establishment who were desperate for a giant Jack-shaped smokescreen to hide what only they knew was really going on.

But imagine for one second that the police were sceptical of this letter being anything but a sick prank, but could not be sure who they were dealing with. Isn’t it entirely reasonable, in any other scenario but yours, that the decision to expose the handwriting to as many people as possible was taken with the aim of smoking out the miscreant and giving him (or her) hell, in order to deter others? Besides, the police could hardly pretend this one didn’t exist, and the CNA would make mincemeat out of them for not publicising it if the murderer struck again and was later caught and found to have matching handwriting that could have been recognised much sooner.

Or was Central News in it with the police?

The thing is, the sack loads of subsequent letters, arriving on the back of Dear Boss and Saucy, had the illogical, but understandable effect of turning the person behind ‘Jack the Ripper’ from potential murder suspect to the mother of all hoaxers. In a similar way (although the logic is forwards here, not backwards) you will need to make your Scotland Yard conspiracy (ie the promotion of a single killer, knowing it was not the case) stand out powerfully from the dross we’ve seen over the years from other conspiracy theorists. At least the Dear Boss dross got some credibility by being (the) original. Had the killer finally put pen to paper after a score of hoaxers had started without him, he wouldn’t have had a prayer of being taken seriously, even if he included details that only half a dozen people besides himself were meant to know. One pair of loose lips can very quickly spread to fifty. This is the kind of logic you are up against. You could have hit the jackpot, but how are you going to prove it to all the sceptical souls among us who have seen it all before? Isn’t being sceptical precisely what brought you to this point?

The cops fell over themselves in their stampede to promote the Jack the Ripper phenomenon, thus riding roughshod over Howard Vincent's earlier strictures on dealing with the press–

"Police must not on any account give any information whatever to gentlemen connected with the press, relative to matters within police knowledge, or relative to duties to be performed or orders received, or communicate in any manner, either directly or indirectly, with editors, or reporters of newspapers, on any matter connected with the public service, without express and special authority . . . "

So are you saying here that if they had all done their duty to a man, and kept steadfastly silent on the subject of the murders, that would have looked less like they knew something they didn’t want the great unwashed to know? Isn’t it more likely that they were in the same boat as everyone else, and that most couldn’t help themselves remarking on this remarkable, but all too real phenomenon of motiveless menopausal mutilation?

Ted Bundy is a real name of a real person, "Jack the Ripper" is not, it's just a meaningless nickname that the killer or killers most probably never used.

It narrows down our view because it cements the idea of a single, male and probably quite mad killer of prostitutes. Looked at in that light, the Jack the Ripper label and the inspiration behind it is only slightly above the level of the misleading LVP chauvinism that "surely no Englishman could have done it"...

Hi Boris,

How patronising can you get?

If the name itself doesn’t narrow down your view in this way, why are you assuming it has ever narrowed down ‘our’ view? Whoever attached the JtR label in the first place got their ‘inspiration’ from the real bloody murder of real women.

I don’t believe there is anyone here who is incapable of separating the JtR label from the crimes we discuss here, ie the Whitechapel murders from Smith to Coles. That would put them only slightly above the level of a carrot.

Love,

Caz
X

[Tom_Wescott]

My take on the Ripper letters is that while I think Jack the Ripper may have written one or more, I don't necessarily think any of the letters were Ripper letters.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[FrankO]

What would have been so enterprising about giving a fancy name to a man who killed twice at most, if C3, 4 and 5 had never happened?

Nothing much, I’d say, Caz. But that’s where the ‘keep it back until’ construction kicks in: the CNA would just throw away the letter and no harm would be done. If he was a hoaxer, that was the writer’s safety net, if you will.

If, however, other mutilated bodies would turn up, he could be sure the letter and this fancy name he’d invented would get maximum exposure and, even though he himself was unknown, his letter & postcard would get famous.

All the best,
Frank