Different Killers

[lynn cates]

useless

Hello Errata. Thanks.

"Victimology as a toll in and of itself is fairly useless"

Now on THAT we agree.

Cheers.
LC

[Rosella]

Stewart Evans however, did promote Tumblety as chief suspect for Jack the Ripper, not something accepted by many other authors in the field.

His belief in Tumblety as a killer and the knowledge that he may have been under lock and key at the time of Mary Kelly's death would have influenced Evans to discount Kelly as a Ripper victim. It would also have affected his belief in the number of victims murdered by the Whitechapel killer.

[lynn cates]

varia

Hello Harry.

"What happened to Nichols & Chapman's killer?"

He was locked away at Grove Hall Lunatic Asylum until February of 1889, then transferred to Banstead.

"If we believe Lynn & Michael, we have potentially FOUR different knife-wielding murderers within three months operating in the same small, localized area."

And if we DON'T believe, then we still have a torso killer and Emma's killer and Tabram's and McKenzie's and Coles' and . . .

"If Eddowes & Kelly were murdered by different hands, where is the sign of escalation?"

Why SHOULD there be escalation? Simply because of some fool social scientist and his theories.

"It's hard to believe that either of these two murders were the killer's first. What evidence do we have for other murders building up to these, if not C1 & C2?"

Vide supra.

"These are all valid questions. . ."

All of which depend on a certain result having taken place and a social scientific view. If you go back 30 years the "valid" question would be, "How could there be so many men with syphilis all seeking revenge on prostitutes? And why? Because many had concluded that revenge for syphilis was the motive.

". . . which need to be accounted for if anyone wants the multiple-killer theory to be taken seriously."

Actually, I don't. I'm having too much enjoyment with all the nonsense concerning Druitt, Kosminski, Tumblety and a host of other non-starters.

Cheers.
LC

[lynn cates]

sadism

Hello Rosella. Stewart is quite right to promote Tumblety--as a SUSPECT. He was clearly that, as per Littlechild.

But Littlechild also differed Dr. T from the ripper on grounds of sadism.

Cheers.
LC

[Ausgirl]

To Aus, before I respond to your victimology lecture, I find it interesting that for many years here I received the shout downs from the senior members about some of my ideas and responded about as rudely as you do. That being said, I see little to compare with the logic and reason that was used back then.

"Mary Kelly was indeed a good bit younger and prettier, but who knows, she might have fit the ideal in some other, less tangible way - the sound of her voice, the way she wore her hair. In any case, it was out with the entrails, wasn't it, and he could 'complete' (or 'exhaust') his desire to mutilate with unprecedented freedom."

You see the motivations poetically do you, lovely sentiments for a killer, but the evidence that began this series suggests that a stranger used the womens own weakness, the need to earn money on the street, to lure or follow them to a place where he could kill them with 2 extremely deep throat cuts and then proceed to attack their abdominal area. Mary Kelly was younger by almost half their ages, far more attractive, and she was indoors in her sleeping attire in bed, .... the abdominal area cannot be seen as the focal point of those mutilations due to the variety of cuts that likely took longer than a single abdominal extraction in the dark would.

No-one but you used the terms cookie-cutter, or exact to point out that there are significant differences in the murders. Its clear that within the evidence that it is the case. Then you announce your challenge for anyone to show you a list of victims by a killer as you way of explaining these differences off.....like you have a list of victims by one man to begin with that makes the comparison valid. Nonsense. You have 5 women dead and 1 assumed killer, and if assumptions are your specialty, so be it. Better to assume than to do any hard work...like finding a common thread to connect the five beyond mere geography and historical context.

I gather you believe that women as victims and throat cuts are enough to group these murders. And I suppose you believe that only 1 person in the East End of London at the time was capable of, and driven to, those sorts of acts. So.... men who dynamite innocent children were incapable of it?, or a man who cuts limbs off his victims and disposes of the Torsos?, or a man who kills and buries the bodies of his wife and children?, or a man who spent years in prison for attacking and killing prostitutes with a knife?, or someone who cuts a child in half and stuffs him in a barrel?, ...all of these people and more were within reach of Whitechapel at that time. So do we pick one of the maniacs, or assume as is your preference that one was sicker than the others? Only 1 could have done it?

Preposterous as it looks on paper.

Lots of men in that area could kill, some did, and anyone with a knife could have killed victim 3 in the Canon.

Here are some other unsolved murders of the period;

"It was the boast of Mr. Howard Vincent, at the time he was head of the Criminal Investigation Department, that London is the safest city in the world; and so it would seem to be - for the assassin. The undiscovered murders of recent years make a long list.

Passing over the murder of Mrs. Squires and her daughter in their shop at Hoxton in broad daylight; the killing of Jane Maria Clousen in Kidbrook-lane, near Eltham; the murder of the housekeeper to Bevingtons, of Cannon-street, we come to, perhaps, the best remembered and most sensational of the mysterious crimes of the past. On the morning of Christmas-day, 1872, Harriet Buswell was discovered with her throat cut. She was a ballet-girl, employed at the Alhambra, and had been accompanied to her home, 12, Great Coram-street, by a "gentleman," supposed to have been a German, who on the way purchased some apples, one of which was left in the room, and bore the impression of his teeth. This half-eaten apple was the sole clue to the murderer, who was never found. A German clergyman named Hessel was arrested at Ramsgate on suspicion three weeks after the murder, but a protracted magisterial investigation resulted in his complete acquittal.

-Mrs. Samuel was brutally done to death at her house in Burton-crescent, and a few doors further up Annie Yeats was murdered under precisely similar circumstances to those attending the death of Harriet Buswell.

-Miss Hacker was found dead in a coal-cellar in the house of one Sebastian Bashendorff, in Euston-square, and Hannah Dobbs was tried, but acquitted. An almost identical case happened in Harley-street. In this case the victim was unknown.

-Another unknown woman was discovered lying in Burdett-road, Bow, murdered.

-Mrs. Reville, a butcher's wife, of Slough, was found sitting in a chair with her throat cut, but no one was apprehended.

-Then there was the murder of an unfortunate in her home near Pye-street, Westminster. A rough fellow was known to have gone home with her, and he left an old and dirty neckerchief behind, but he was never found.

-Mrs. Samuel was killed with impunity in the Kentish Town Dairy.

-The murderer of Miss Clark, who was found at the foot of the stairs in her house, George-street, Marylebone, has gone unpunished.

Besides these there are the cases in which the victims have been men. A grocer's assistant was stabbed to death in the Walworth-road by a man who was stealing a pound of tea from a cart. The act was committed in the sight of a number of people, but the man got away, and to this day has not been captured. Mr. Tower, returning from midnight service on New Year's eve was found in the Stoke Newington reservoir. The police failing to get the faintest clue adopted the theory of suicide, but could get nothing to substantiate it. On 29 March 1884, E. J. Perkins, a clerk in a City office at 2, Arthur-street West, was murdered and from Saturday till Monday his body lay in a cellar in the basement of the building. Lieutenant Roper was shot at the top of the barrack stairs at Chatham, and, though Percy Lefroy Mapleton, who was hanged for the murder of Mr. Gould on the Brighton Railway, accused himself of the murder, it was proved that he could have had no connection with the lieutenant's death. Urban Napoleon Stanger, the baker, of Whitechapel, who vanished so mysteriously, we pass over. The list, though incomplete, is ghastly enough."

Why not assign all these murders of women by knife to the same killer? At least be consistent.

Bold 1: It wasn't my 'lecture'. Feel free to gripe at Errata for that excellent post.

Bold 2: They spoke to you like a total ass as well. did they? Then you should understand where I'm coming from.

Bold 3: Not poetically, at all. In the real world, not all motives are tangible and obvious in the handiwork of a killer. Some exist only in the killer's head, and are unknowable unless he is caught and talks about them. That's reality, bub. But I can write a poem about it, if you like.

Bold 4: I don't know how many times I have to say it, but here it is again: it's not necessary for all victims to have actually been prostitutes. The Yorkshire Ripper loved to kill working girls, he killed a lot of them, they were his primary goal, but not all his victims were prostitutes. One was a pretty teenager whom he would have no reason to even begin to suspect was a prostitute. Yet she was killed by the same hand as all those working girls, go figure.

Bold 5: What I was saying there, just to make it clear for you, is that arguing significant differences in MO as evidence of different killers is illogical, when there's killers who have multiple times the number of victims, were actually caught, and 100%, inarguably, and man I am not making this **** up, really they did use significantly different MO's in multiple murders. That's what I'm saying there.

Bold 6: Whatever.

Bold 7: The idea there -- has to be -- this "common thread" you keep banging on about is a complete fallacy. And pure speculation, to boot. In the real world, sometimes the only thread between victims is that one killer killed them all. In this case, there's several threads of similarity in the victims, enough to make coincidence seem quite unlikely.

Bold 8: For a man who likes to stick to facts, Michael, you sure can be fanciful when you're insulting people. Wild fiction, completely untrue. I've commented on this "only women with cut throats" business earlier. Perhaps you didn't read it. In any case, my posts prove you wrong there.

Bold 9: Whatever.

Bold 10: London's East End was crawling with violent crime - is this what you're saying? Yup, I knew that already, but thanks for the list.

Being that it was rife with violent crime, why is it that this particular span of murders were so sensational - not just to the papers, let's leave them out of this for a moment. These crimes were deeply shocking to the locals, and to police -- why? Why would that be? In this den of embarrelled kiddies and people blowing things up, what made these crimes stand out? Obviously, they were above and beyond (except for Stride) the usual sort of murder, and also were happening thick and fast, and also there were enough similarities between the deaths that it being one person was a reasonable assumption for those professionals concerned who believed that this was not coincidence, and they were all done by the same hand.

JtR may indeed have killed a good many other people; unless he's identified we'll never know, and even then we might not.

See, in this here modern era, in which killers like that have been caught and studied for some decades now, it's absolutely, 100%, I **** you not, proven that *some* will kill outside the parameters of any given pattern they happen to prefer. This makes some of them very hard to catch. In some cases, the crimes have no perceptible link but DNA - which of course wasn't around in the Ripper era - or a confession. Hence, that list I offered you earlier. You can look them up, see for yourself, or have James Randi check it out -- whatever.

[Errata]

Hello Errata. Thanks.

"Victimology as a toll in and of itself is fairly useless"

Now on THAT we agree.

Cheers.
LC

Well it's like a store inventory. It's mere trivia to know how many wrenches you have. You have to compare it to other things, like how many wrenches did you have, how many hammers, how quickly did you sell them and when will you run out that it becomes useful.

[John Wheat]

Hello John. Thanks.

Alcohol cannot explain a basic difference like skill level.

Cheers.
LC

Hi Lynn

Alcohol could explain a perceived difference in skill level.

Cheers John

[Batman]

1. You need more murders for multiple murders due to the complexity. Where are they?
2. Eddowes was killed earlier than the others also.
3. Both victims necks slashed while lying down.
4. Within minutes of each other.
5. Even Nichols was murdered far away from the killers hot zone
6. Witness descriptions of the killer made both witnesses candidates for later identification parades.
7. We have evidence there was a witness who disturbed the murder. This was predicted, that the killer was disturbed.
8. Contemporary view has her as canonical.

[lynn cates]

agree

Hello Errata. Thanks.

We agree again. It's my dictum about HOW not WHAT.

Cheers.
LC

[lynn cates]

quomodo

Hello John. Thanks.

How, particularly? Frequently, one becomes MORE inebriated as the night progresses.

Cheers.
LC

[John Wheat]

Hello John. Thanks.

How, particularly? Frequently, one becomes MORE inebriated as the night progresses.

Cheers.
LC

Hi Lynn

Different levels of inebriation would explain perceived differences in things like surgical skill or lack of. In other words I would expect a lack of surgical skill if the killer was particularly loaded and comparatively more surgical skill if the killer was sober.

Cheers John

[chrismasonic]

I may be wrong but I don't think there is any proof that the throats were slashed while lying down...
if you wrap someone's neck from behind with your knife hand...cover there mouth with the other and draw your knife across the throat as you lower them to the ground...your going to get what we have here...

[Ausgirl]

I may be wrong but I don't think there is any proof that the throats were slashed while lying down...
if you wrap someone's neck from behind with your knife hand...cover there mouth with the other and draw your knife across the throat as you lower them to the ground...your going to get what we have here...

Yes - repeatedly.

There's some really good threads on just this topic that I found a while back, I'll link them for you when my net's not being shonky.

[Jon Guy]

I may be wrong but I don't think there is any proof that the throats were slashed while lying down...
if you wrap someone's neck from behind with your knife hand...cover there mouth with the other and draw your knife across the throat as you lower them to the ground...your going to get what we have here...

A lack of arterial spray and a pool of blood by the wound in the neck is often a sign that the throat was cut whilst the victim was lying down.

[lynn cates]

proportion

Hello John. Thanks.

Indeed. But I was observing that inebriation might be enhanced as the night progresses--not diminished.

Cheers.
LC