Gary Ridgway and Jack killed prostitutes

[NOV9]

Gary Leon Ridgway, 52,Green River Killer. He is 5' 10" tall, 155 pounds. Drank beer and solicited prostitutes for over 20 years

He read the Bible at work and tried to save others by continually talking about church and the savior.

He has lived in the same area all his life.

His ex-wife told police his mother dominated the household.

Ridgway was D student at Tyee High School in SeaTac, WA; he graduated class of 1969, at the age of 20.

All he had to do was open his mouth and he'd be in trouble.

As a young adult, he was repeatedly involved with prostitutes.

After a failed attempt to join a local police department, Ridgway started working in the paint department at Kenworth Truck Co., where he worked for 32 years.

Coworkers remember Ridgway carried a Bible, flirted with the females, told filthy jokes, offered to fix a coworker up with a prostitute, joked around about his own fondness of prostitutes and seemed preoccupied with his appearance.

He was considered a dutiful son. He was "very close" to his mother but not to his father.

He choked a prostitute and a former wife; he placed both in a police-type chokehold in 1982.

I beleive that the more you know about serial killers the more you can understand Jack.

Another interesting coincidence is Green River (GR) is also the initials of Gary Ridgway.

NOV9 asked me to post this. while he is on assignment.

Dennis

[Jon Guy]

Hi Dennis

But Jack, unlike Ridgway, Sutcliffe or Wright (can`t think of any other killers that preyed on prostitutes !!) doesn`t appear to have had sex with his victims.

[NOV9]

Hi Dennis

But Jack, unlike Ridgway, Sutcliffe or Wright (can`t think of any other killers that preyed on prostitutes !!) doesn`t appear to have had sex with his victims.

Hi Jon,

That is true but he used his knife, and in a sick way that is how he had sex with the victim.

I'm not saying that they are alike, but in a way they sort of thought alike.

A lot of serial killers think alike is what I'm trying to say.

Similar problems with people in all.

I'm much better at verbal discussions.

-Dennis

P.S. I think I should leave this to NOV9

Thanks for answering my post.

[CraigInTwinCities]

I believe entirely too much is made of trivialities in this field, and not enough is made of the things that actually matter.

Someone does a single pass through the evidence of Jack and some other serial and makes bland, surface comparisons that are too simplistic even for the FBI Profile of Jack (itself a cliche-ridden joke).

I bring this up because it's an area I'm doing extensive research in; analyzing Jack, analyzing other serials and seeing what we can learn in the process of synthesizing the data found as a result.

This is not INTENDED as a slam against anyone posting in this thread, but I'm reacting to this sort of process in general, the "miss the forest for the trees" aspect.

Like so, and I'll pick on Jon Guy here because his post is brief...

OK, yes, Jack did not have (apparently) sex with his victims and many other serials did or do.

So what? Does that mean there's nothing to learn by studying the crimes of both? If we could only learn about serials by comparing only those who operate in pretty much the exact same way, we'd never learn ANYTHING about serials. Because they're all fairly unique in their MO.

Their crimes, if studied properly, are like fingerprints... sure... but that's only useful once you know who they are and, really, not very useful when identity is still a mystery. One cannot look at, say, the Mary Kelly murder scene and say, "Well, no signs of sexual assault, near-total desecration of the body, and done indoors... it matches only one of three criteria, so it can't be Jack."

Similarly, one cannot come upon that scene, cite those three criteria, and suddenly declare, "By Jove! The killer is Colonel Mustard, in the parlor, with a candlestick!"

Where am I going with all this?

Well, for one, if we're delving into the pysche of serials, I think base movitations are of more utility than MO trivialities.

Or maybe I should simply rely on the words of a police detective I truly admire, because he's one of the few law enforcement men who has ever really unraveled a cold-case serial killer mystery and arrested the suspect AND secured a confession.

I'm speaking of Lt. Ken Landwehr of the Wichita Police, head of homicide at the time that the BTK Task Force he led fingered Dennis Rader as the enigmatic BTK Strangler, a 27-year mystery in Wichita, KS.

Here's what Lt. Landwehr had to say about this sort of topic, and I think it has insight and application to Ripperology in general. It's not all directly Landwehr speaking, it's a quote from a book. Here goes:

"Here's where detectives get themselves lost," Landwehr told Relph the day they first talked about BTK. "They get lost on some guy's story. A guy looks good as a suspect; if you have maybe twelve criteria for being the right guy for a crime, and this guy meets ten of the twelve, then he's looking good. And so the detective gets enthralled, chases his story - and goes off on a tangent, a wild goose chase. Because if the guy's DNA doesn't match the DNA from the crime, it's not him. And then you have to drop him like a rock."

Relph began to apply this advice while reading about BTK and working on other cases.

"How do you not get lost in all these thousands of pages of evidence,?" Relph asked.

"Don't try to get into all that peripheral evidence," Landwehr said. "Just read the actual case files. Focus on the essentials."

(Wenzel, Potter, Kelly and Laviana, "Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of the Serial Killer Next Door," HarperCollins, p. 145, 2007.)

Good advice for all us Ripperologists, I would suggest! Sure, DNA is not relevant in Jack's case, but the principal of "getting lost in" one suspect's story and going off on a wild goose chase does apply; we are many of us far too hesitant to drop a pet suspect because it makes SUCH a good story if it were him. When we encounter contrary evidence, often we ignore it at our convenience and cling to our suspect too hard.

And certainly getting lost in all the peripheral evidence is an error all too common on these boards and in much Ripper literature. (It's not a terrible crime, it's human nature.) But the advice of sticking to the case files and focusing on the essentials of the crimes is good advice even for Ripperology.

Much as I appreciate his attention to detail, for example, Karyo Magellen's BY EAR AND BY EYES is an example of getting lost in the minutae, I think, of the forensic trivia, rather than focusing on the essentials of a case... Not that Karyo's work is without merit, mind you; it's fascinating. But I think his work displays some of these bad/misleading tendencies that Landwehr defines above.

Just food for thought!

[truebluedub]

Hi Craig,
just to come to Karyo's defence surely the value of his work comes from the fact that he looks at which of the victims might be by the same hand wiithout having a particular suspect in mind. That said some of his conclusions are clearly out to lunch.
Kind regards
Chris Lowe

[CraigInTwinCities]

Yeah, don't carry what I said further than intended, definitely. Karyo's book was a fun read... though it does fall into a certain category.

[Jon Guy]

Hi Jon,
That is true but he used his knife, and in a sick way that is how he had sex with the victim.
I'm not saying that they are alike, but in a way they sort of thought alike.
A lot of serial killers think alike is what I'm trying to say.
Similar problems with people in all.
I'm much better at verbal discussions.
-Dennis
P.S. I think I should leave this to NOV9
Thanks for answering my post.

Hi again Dennis

You did raise an interesting point, and I hope you don`t think I was attacking your post.

My brief reply only aimed to raise the issue that Jack did not have sex with his victims, or leave discharge at the crime scene. Nothing more, nothing less.

Keep posting Dennis - set your own log -in up !!!

[Jon Guy]

I believe entirely too much is made of trivialities in this field, and not enough is made of the things that actually matter.

Someone does a single pass through the evidence of Jack and some other serial and makes bland, surface comparisons that are too simplistic even for the FBI Profile of Jack (itself a cliche-ridden joke).

I bring this up because it's an area I'm doing extensive research in; analyzing Jack, analyzing other serials and seeing what we can learn in the process of synthesizing the data found as a result.

This is not INTENDED as a slam against anyone posting in this thread, but I'm reacting to this sort of process in general, the "miss the forest for the trees" aspect.

Like so, and I'll pick on Jon Guy here because his post is brief...

OK, yes, Jack did not have (apparently) sex with his victims and many other serials did or do.

So what? Does that mean there's nothing to learn by studying the crimes of both? If we could only learn about serials by comparing only those who operate in pretty much the exact same way, we'd never learn ANYTHING about serials. Because they're all fairly unique in their MO.

Their crimes, if studied properly, are like fingerprints... sure... but that's only useful once you know who they are and, really, not very useful when identity is still a mystery. One cannot look at, say, the Mary Kelly murder scene and say, "Well, no signs of sexual assault, near-total desecration of the body, and done indoors... it matches only one of three criteria, so it can't be Jack."

Similarly, one cannot come upon that scene, cite those three criteria, and suddenly declare, "By Jove! The killer is Colonel Mustard, in the parlor, with a candlestick!"

Where am I going with all this?

Well, for one, if we're delving into the pysche of serials, I think base movitations are of more utility than MO trivialities.

Or maybe I should simply rely on the words of a police detective I truly admire, because he's one of the few law enforcement men who has ever really unraveled a cold-case serial killer mystery and arrested the suspect AND secured a confession.

I'm speaking of Lt. Ken Landwehr of the Wichita Police, head of homicide at the time that the BTK Task Force he led fingered Dennis Rader as the enigmatic BTK Strangler, a 27-year mystery in Wichita, KS.

Here's what Lt. Landwehr had to say about this sort of topic, and I think it has insight and application to Ripperology in general. It's not all directly Landwehr speaking, it's a quote from a book. Here goes:



Good advice for all us Ripperologists, I would suggest! Sure, DNA is not relevant in Jack's case, but the principal of "getting lost in" one suspect's story and going off on a wild goose chase does apply; we are many of us far too hesitant to drop a pet suspect because it makes SUCH a good story if it were him. When we encounter contrary evidence, often we ignore it at our convenience and cling to our suspect too hard.

And certainly getting lost in all the peripheral evidence is an error all too common on these boards and in much Ripper literature. (It's not a terrible crime, it's human nature.) But the advice of sticking to the case files and focusing on the essentials of the crimes is good advice even for Ripperology.

Much as I appreciate his attention to detail, for example, Karyo Magellen's BY EAR AND BY EYES is an example of getting lost in the minutae, I think, of the forensic trivia, rather than focusing on the essentials of a case... Not that Karyo's work is without merit, mind you; it's fascinating. But I think his work displays some of these bad/misleading tendencies that Landwehr defines above.

Just food for thought!

Glad you decided to pick on me, although I think you missed the point.

"Essentials of the case" .. hmmmm...I said "Jack did not have sex with his victims or discharge at the scene of the crime".

Any other prostitute killers like this ?

[Ben]

I'd agree that Gary Ridgway is one of the stronger comparison cases with Jack the Ripper.

[Jon Guy]

I'd agree that Gary Ridgway is one of the stronger comparison cases with Jack the Ripper.

Hi Ben

I`d say Sutcliffe. Apart from the stabbing and slashing, he allowed himself to be picked up in red light areas, to be taken to where the prostitutes wanted to go(Ridgway took them home),a secluded area, and he left them lying where he attacked them.Ridgway drove the corpses to rural areas.

What was it about Ridgway that you see in comparison ?

[CraigInTwinCities]

Glad you decided to pick on me, although I think you missed the point.

"Essentials of the case" .. hmmmm...I said "Jack did not have sex with his victims or discharge at the scene of the crime".

Any other prostitute killers like this ?

Your quote was a handy and brief example, wasn't trying to single you out.

As for the quote itself... well, it's a fairly elementary observation and while it is useful, perhaps, in distinguishing a Jack crime from a non-Jack crime ALONG WITH MANY OTHER ELEMENTS, I would maintain that it's hardly the big identifier some researchers insist it is.

If the Ripper had operated in 1998 instead of 1888, perhaps it would be a way to say, "Ha ha! The killer knows about DNA technology and wants to avoid being identified via his semen."

Which, still, in and of itself, doesn't really point to one particular suspect over another. Again, evidence like this is useful only for identifying the pathology of a criminal once you know who he is and have him in custody and are trying to decide which crimes to charge him with.

But, pre-capture, there's not much utility to it, I suspect. For example, in the BTK case in the 1970s portion of the investigation, cops used a matrix of such identity screening criteria and TOTALLY missed Dennis Rader, because he only showed up on ONE of their criteria... that the killer might be someone who worked at the Coleman Plant... but even then they were looking for him in the wrong period of employment because by then he was employed by ADT Home Security, which they never guessed.

It's a tricky, inexact thing, profiling, and it involves the utilization of several factors; even when it works, coming to the right conclusion depends entirely on whether the right screening factors were chosen.

So, no personal insult intended, but saying that "Gee, Jack never sexually assaulted his victims but most serials do" is kind of equivilent to an art student, without drawing anything, suddenly raising a hand in a master's-level painting class to observe, "Orange is made up of red and yellow!"

In other words, its a fairly basic observation we're all aware of; but it fails to take into account many factors, including (just to name a couple) 1) Dr. Bond, back then, made it clear that sexual connection between killer and victim was not required for a killer to meet the definition of sexual psychopath, an observation nearly all experts in the field agree with, and 2) serial murder, like rape, is not primarily about the sexual act, so much as it is about the killer exercising complete control over the victim. It's not about sex, it's about power. The sexual aspect is more or less a side-effect (or, from the killer's perspective, a side-benefit.)

Saying that Jack did not have intercourse with or masterbate onto his victims also doesn't mean he received no sexual gratification from his crimes, just that he left no such evidence of that gratification behind... and who knows what we might have uncovered at the scenes had modern crime tech like Luminol and black lights been available. So all we can really say is that there were no "observable with the naked eye" levels of semen in, on or around the corpses. Beyond that, it's guessing in the dark.

It's like this: too often, folks take a fact like this one (Jack didn't sexually assault his victims) to pooh-pooh the value of observations and comparisons that can be made between Jack and a serial killer who DID rape his victims in the obvious, penis-centric style, as with Gary Ridgeway.

But that mindset places far too much emphasis on penile sexual assault as a motivational factor. What I am suggesting is that mindset misses the forest for the trees; while interesting in some minor ways, it does not speak to the psychological motivations of the killer as much as some would assume.

Also, keep in mind that murders like this are complex and many factors play in, some of which the police have no way of knowing until they've arrested the right guy and obtain a confession.

For example, some folks don't want to include Liz Stride because she wasn't cut up enough, and pooh-pooh the rather basic suggestion of interruption being a factor in that.

Well, in the same way... police attributed only 8 deaths, prior to Rader's capture, to the BTK Strangler because two of the deaths didn't match up to enough of the factors they considered important. Yet Rader, in pre-capture taunting of law enforcement, led his "BTK is back" media blitz by revealing that the cops had missed two of his kills, and providing evidence that indeed they were his victims.

While Ridgeway and BTK tended to either rape or masterbate on their victims, it didn't happen in every single case, and often it was indeed because of simple factors like, "the killer felt he couldn't stay very long and do the job properly." Fear of discovery.

Really, I could go on and on, but I think this should be sufficient to convey my meaning... gotta save something for my next research piece, after all, LOL.

[Dan Norder]

Some of the serial killers that have obvious similarities with Jack the Ripper, in my view, include Andrei Chikatilo, Simon Sosztarich (I am presuming that he was responsible for the the mutilation murder of Francisca Hofer even though he was only charged for a later, presumably interrupted murder) and Joseph Vacher. Without knowing more of the exact details of how Jack worked it'd be difficult to pick a killer that is most similar.

As far as serial killers who murdered prostitutes go, there's a long, long list. Chikatilo and Sosztarich killed prostitutes. Larry Bright and Robert Pickton, both in the news recently, seemed to primarily choose prostitutes as victims. I tend not to memorize names and details of other serial killer cases so I can't name others and be sure of getting the names or details right without looking them up, but I can think of a good five or more I've read about, which means there are certainly a lot more than that.

[Christine]

Peter Kurten ("The Vampire of Dusseldorf") murdered and mutilated (sometimes sexually) anyone he could find, including animals, children, the elderly, disabled, and prostitutes. He had orgasms, but did not always rape the victims. He did rape most of the adult females. There's not a lot of pattern to Kurten's murders, and none exactly match the Ripper's pattern, but you can certainly find parallels.

[Ben]

Another relatively recent prostitute serial killer who doesn't receive much attention is John Eric Armstrong:

http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/armstrong/jordan_1.html

[sdreid]

The Cleveland Torso Slayer killed prostitutes as well as transients and others. Bright also killed drug seekers. I used to see him around town when he was kid. Are we talking strictly prostitutes? Of course, some think Eddowes might not have been a prostitute even in JtR.