Colony

[Cap'n Jack]

No, 'it' is a pin used to locate and fix a cannon on board one Her Majesty's vessels.

[Doctor X]

Still no evidence?

So much verbiage, so much tantrum, but not even a teensy, weensy bit of evidence?

Did someone step on Jack? Or did he run after a trail of sugar?

Yours truly,

--J.D.

[caz]

Hi RJ,

You wrote:

‘The FBI profiler then drops the bombshell.

“Logic tells me that homosexuality, or latent homosexuality, plays an important role here,” says Hazelwood. “We do not have scientific data to back that up. It is simply a gut feeling, based on my experience.”

So there you have it, folks. One of the most prominent of all FBI profilers, often referred to and quoted, is stating that the abiding motivation of sexual sadism is: 1) misogyny and 2) homosexuality or latent homosexuality.’



I’ve got to ask - since nobody else has - what gut feelings are telling people (not necessarily you or the FBI profiler) about a character called Shipman, who killed hundreds of patients in his care? Arguably one of the most prolific serial murderers ever, his case is stacked to the ceiling with data and yet he is almost always left out when people’s gut feelings are telling them what makes a serial killer offend in the first place.

Did Dr Shipman hate everyone once they reached a certain age, regardless of gender? Was he bisexual, or a latent bisexual, or just sexually attracted to the elderly of both genders? I don’t think many would argue for any of this being true, much less that any evidence for it exists.

You also wrote:

‘I think that the murderer, through a combination of genetics, personal history, childhood abuse, and/or environmental factors has been left with a deep identity crisis. A gaping black-hole inside that he can’t fill. He hears the hum around him but he doesn’t know where it is coming from. He doesn’t understand it, but he knows it’s there. So he tries to ‘fix it.’ He can do this in many ways. He may drink heavily. He may try to collect huge amounts of currency. He looks for external validation. He may do enormous amounts of psychoactive drugs. He may join the salvation army and bang on a tamberine. He cross-dresses, thinking maybe that’s the problem. Nothing helps. So he inject his veins with rabbit blood, like APW’s friend Richard Chase. Doesn’t work. He tries to alter his sexuality, thinking maybe that’s what is doing it. His snorts cholorform like Neill Cream. He changes his clothes and his personal appearance frequently (like Bundy, Manson, and, by the way, Francis Tumblety). Nothing fills that black-hole. So, finally, when nothing else works, he tries violence. He goes out and finds a surrogate victim. He may, or may not, sexually abuse the vicitm.’

This is all very well, but doesn’t the violence often begin at a very early age, and manifest itself in cruelty to animals for example, or to weaker classmates or even to siblings - long before he could have thought of experimenting with alcohol, drugs or sex, to find out what might be ailing him and seek a ‘fix’? I doubt a boy thinks there is anything much lacking in his life when he first trains the sun on an ant using a magnifying glass. If the same boy goes on to tie a firework to a kitten’s tail, is it because he has an abiding hatred of cats that will follow him to the grave, or a secret desire to mate with them?

You also wrote:

‘Why women? For the same reason Natalie states. But this doesn’t entirely destroy APW’s argument. The Ripper is killing the victims that society (the colony) deems it justiable to victimize. At least that’s what he’s telling himself.’

That would be fine if it began and ended with women in every case, but as we’ve seen with Shipman, or the little boy who thinks it’s a hoot to watch animals suffer, it doesn't - not by any means. Shipman was arguably killing victims that he knew society did not consider to be productive, was not expecting to become productive in the future and was assuming to be merely waiting for God to do His bit and provide a merciful release from this vale of tears. He may or may not have been telling himself that his victims’ lives didn’t even matter to the victims themselves, and therefore he could play with them to his heart’s content. Nothing sexual, more a case of boys being boys taken to the most hideous of extremes in his case. Sorry if that sounds sexist, but there it is.

Why no word about addictions, and which are common to both males and females and which are more common (but not exclusive) to one or the other?

Sex and violence are just two more features in human nature’s bag of tricks that can become an addiction. But like sex, violence tends to have a more instant and urgent appeal to the male of the species than to the female (undoubtedly due to that little rascal, testosterone); the latter generally (though not always) needing a specific reason, a specific set of circumstances and a specific individual in mind, before she feels particularly roused to either activity, especially with or against neutral individuals or complete strangers.

I have to ask if there is not something we can learn from girls who grow up to fall in love several times a month, or to marry six times, or to buy the same frock in three different colours and three different sizes (to allow for yo-yo dieting), or to eat every chocolate in the box in one sitting, and who see every other woman on the planet as happier than they could ever hope to be, and think it’s because every other woman on the planet must already have everything she could possibly desire.

Where in all this human frailty does the rare, but in-your-face Shipmans of the world, and the all too common little boy who tortures cats, come into the picture?

I agree that sex isn’t the be all and end all, but every rare animal who goes in for the serial snuffing out of life also has to deal with their bodily instincts connected with carrying on their own species. Not hard to see how confusion reigns and makes motivation a guess at best. And that’s just the killer guessing at his own motives. Does an addict really ever know why they are hell bent on the destruction of themselves, or of others?

Love,

Caz
X

[Cap'n Jack]

Nice post, Caz, but it is wise to remember that Shipman got about £200 for every death certificate he signed.
Just a greedy bastard, perhaps?

[Natalie Severn]

£200 might just about have funded his particular "addiction" then!

[Doctor X]

. . . if he convinced the family to cremate them he got . . . "Ash Cash!"

Mo' Money! Mo' Money! Mo' Money!

--J.D.

[caz]

Hi Cap'n and Nats,

Part and parcel of the same thing perhaps? Feeding one's needs and desires, whatever the cost to the victims used in the process?

For whatever reasons, Shipman developed a drug habit and a murder habit. Being a doctor with access to patients was what allowed him to indulge both. Whether or not financial greed was a third habit that played a part in his behaviour or led directly to his murder habit, makes little difference as far as I can see. That would just make three habits instead of two that drove him. He killed himself when he was forced into withdrawal from all his addictions at once.

Small boys developing a secret liking for violence, or for playing power games with living creatures, are rather stuck with small animals that don't fight back; they seldom have access to anything else. So could one make a case for the fully developed serial killer, who succeeds in killing time and time again before he is caught, merely cutting his garment according to his cloth, and picking his victims according to the access he already has to them, on account of his other habits, his job, or certain personality traits?

Do Bundy's victims (to begin with at least) merely reflect the free and easy access he already had to a certain type of young woman via looks, charm and intelligence? Do Shipman's merely reflect the free and easy access he had to the elderly via his profession (like the access he had to drugs), and the trust they had in him? Do Steve Wright's victims simply reflect the easy access he had to Ipswich prostitutes via his habit of paying for casual sex? Who is a drug-addicted prostitute going to depend upon with her life, if not a sex-addicted punter?

Where sexual activity does take place, either before, during or after a murder, is it perhaps an indication of an offender whose sexual habits helped give him access to his potential murder victims in the first place? Could it equally be a case of "while you're down there", when a victim also happens to be someone the offender would not normally kick out of bed?

This is where it all gets tricky with Mary Kelly, and the insistence by some that she wasn't a ripper victim. If Jack's victims reflect a habit of using female street walkers for sex (which is at least a reasonable working hypothesis), this would in turn have given him all the experience and access he needed to victims who would let him indulge his developing habit for murder and mutilation. He would not necessarily have wanted sex with every unfortunate who was ripe for murder, nor wanted to murder every one who was ripe for sex. But who's to say the two habits would not have collided if a victim was deemed ripe for both?

Love,

Caz
X

[Cap'n Jack]

Another cracking post, Caz, you got all cylinders fired up okay.
But it does appear to me that there is a lot of calculation in the reasoning and motive of a killer like Shipman, or even Bundy.
Bundy slips a plaster cast on to get a girl to help him into his beat up old Volks, and then kills her, if he can, after having some kind of weird sex with her.
Shipman smiles, hands out pills and potions, to get the old girls out of his surgery. Go, just go, swallow that and you'll be fine. As long as you are not cluttering up my surgery, that's fine.
Richard Chase walks in the room, he wants rabbit blood and he wants to drink it, and inject it into his veins. He wants to cover himself in cow blood, naked in the back of his pick-up.
The cops catch him.
Richard cannot explain or justify what he is doing.
He is sitting in the back of a pick-up, drenched in the blood of a cow he has just slaughtered.
Why?
We know 'why' with Bundy. We know 'why' with Shipman.
We don't know 'why' with Richard, and that is the strange avenue I employ and investigate.

[caz]

Thanks AP.

You may know 'why' with Bundy and 'why' with Shipman (who was convicted of killing more old boys than old girls, I think you'll find, and mainly operated by going unsolicited to a patient's home and playing the Grim Reaper before their natural time was up). But I still have very little clue.

It does, however, seem to relate to the high an addict seeks from repeating certain experiences, and to hell with anyone or anything that gets in their way. Could it be that the experience is the important thing, with victim selection being secondary, and largely dictated by practical considerations, such as an offender's lifestyle, general patterns of behaviour before their first kill and naturally, trying to maximise their chances of getting away with it each time?

Shipman killed a patient one day, possibly by accident, or possibly to see how it felt, got a serious buzz of power and went on to kill more and more patients - because nothing was stopping him and it was the obvious victim choice for a man in his circumstances.

Love,

Caz
X

[Cap'n Jack]

Well, Caz, I think that Shipman just got impatient with his older patients, viewing them as the walking dead who just needed a quick kick to get them over the edge. There is one case which illustrates this desire on his part for a quickening of time.
Given a young patient I'm inclined to believe that Shipman would have done everything in his medical power to help them.
Now that is a powerful distinction, and also a powerful indication of misguided motivation.
With Bundy there is a transmogifuration of motive and intent, where he slips from being a killer attempting to diguise his identity - and that of his victim - after using that victim as some kind of sexual slave; to that of a killer who is stuck in some kind of glue that he doesn't understand where he begins to slay the victims in a haphazard manner rendering them useless for his sexual purpose.
Had his victims changed? No, they were still the dark-haired college girls he had always preyed on. So what changed? What shifted?
Why did Ted become Richard, all of a sudden?
Could it be that his victim tally nullified and robbed him of motive?
And that thus he arrived at the same place that Richard started off from, some kind of wilderness that we do not really understand, but it is a place shockingly full of motive, intent and purpose.
We just gotta understand that place.
This is the job I attempt to job.

[Natalie Severn]

Caz,
The addiction I sensed he got what the sense of power he felt as life left the body-----in other words he was in love with -or addicted to,the moment of death itself,
Natalie

[caz]

Hi Nats,

I suspect you could well be right there.

Well, Caz, I think that Shipman just got impatient with his older patients, viewing them as the walking dead who just needed a quick kick to get them over the edge. There is one case which illustrates this desire on his part for a quickening of time.
Given a young patient I'm inclined to believe that Shipman would have done everything in his medical power to help them.
Now that is a powerful distinction, and also a powerful indication of misguided motivation.
With Bundy there is a transmogifuration of motive and intent, where he slips from being a killer attempting to diguise his identity - and that of his victim - after using that victim as some kind of sexual slave; to that of a killer who is stuck in some kind of glue that he doesn't understand where he begins to slay the victims in a haphazard manner rendering them useless for his sexual purpose.
Had his victims changed? No, they were still the dark-haired college girls he had always preyed on. So what changed? What shifted?
Why did Ted become Richard, all of a sudden?
Could it be that his victim tally nullified and robbed him of motive?
And that thus he arrived at the same place that Richard started off from, some kind of wilderness that we do not really understand, but it is a place shockingly full of motive, intent and purpose.
We just gotta understand that place.
This is the job I attempt to job.

Hi AP,

I think you may just be over-complicating things here. If Shipman was a doctor first, with an income and lifestyle to maintain, and a drug addict and serial murderer second, it would explain why he helped all his much younger patients to life and good health, while helping many of the elderly ones (and a few middle-aged ones - was the youngest confirmed victim something like 55?) to an early grave. Had he practised his murder skills on a much younger patient, he'd have been well aware that it could have been the last time he ever practised on anyone, for good or evil.

That's a mighty powerful motivation for selecting only the patients whose deaths would not be entirely unexpected or cause any raised eyebrows. The act of murder itself is what was misguided. His victim choice was calculated to give him the 'perks' of the job he required on a regular and frequent basis, and for as long as possible. There is no proof that Shipman's victims angered him by living past a sell-by date of his own determination; the reverse could be nearer the truth, in that they kindly provided him with a constant supply of new material.

If Bundy similarly kept preying on a certain type because it had always worked for him, the sexual element would not necessarily have retained the same level of importance from his first attacks to his last. Only his addiction to the violence itself need have endured from the first time it was triggered.

Each offender will have a unique box of tricks, and he will bring out one or more whenever he offends. The supporting tricks may change at different periods of his life, while the underlying motive for offending may be as simple and unchangeable as the buzz he gets from having another life in his hands to do with it whatever he pleases, and remaining free to experience the buzz again another day.

I don't see Jack as any different. I certainly don't see him as someone who had an uncontrollable urge to destroy a specific type of woman, and only when he happened to encounter one in an otherwise deserted Buck's Row, or Hanbury Street backyard, or dark corner of Mitre Square. I see him as someone who made his own opportunities, by calculating that one of the unfortunates who frequented the main thoroughfares after midnight, seeking men just like him to provide them with their most pressing needs, would be the very best bet for providing his next buzz, along with somewhere he could get it without an audience.

Have a great weekend! I will - I have recently discovered the joys of the Raspberry Collins - hic.

Love,

Caz
X

[Cap'n Jack]

Caz, I'm assuming you are aware that Shipman was investigated by the police six months before the first murder allegations emerged and was simply cleared by those investigating officers because he was a doctor and should be trusted?
Along with Shipman we also have to look at the role of six other medical men who simply went along with Shipman and countersigned his death certificates.
They shouldn't have been struck off, but shot.
I think they got fifty quid for the signature.