GSG/DB/SJ.. all mean nothing?

[GUT]

G'day Caz

Hi Pinky,

What if it was merely a "try to keep 'em guessing, keep 'em occupied and keep 'em flustered" kind of exercise? In conjunction with the apron piece, it could have provided the killer with a welcome distraction so he could get himself some much needed shut-eye nearby, while the police were concentrating on searching in and around the Model Dwellings for more 'clues', or just attempting to keep the peace as the market traders began to surface. He wasn't to know how thorough a job they would do, or how many officers might become involved.

Love,

Caz
X

This makes more sense than some of the hypothesis touted around here.

Surely he wanted to keep the authorities "off balance".

[caz]

Hi caz,Just can't see him not mentioning what he has just done also by leaving no doubt message was genuine a lot more police would be tied up searching the surrounding buildings .

Hi Pinky,

If he only wrote the message after taking the trouble to clean up, stash the knife and organs and drop the apron quickly when nobody was about, all that care would have been for nought if he claimed the murders and was caught with chalk in hand. If the worst came to the worst he could deny any knowledge of the apron and admit to defacing the wall with nothing more than a pithy anti-Semitic observation.

On the other hand, he may have chosen a cryptic or ambiguous message out of sheer cussedness. In the aftermath of the Leather Apron business, it would seem rather fitting for a Gentile killer to have conjured up a new association between Jews, blame and an apron, don't you think?

Love,

Caz
X

[Abby Normal]

Hi Pinky,

If he only wrote the message after taking the trouble to clean up, stash the knife and organs and drop the apron quickly when nobody was about, all that care would have been for nought if he claimed the murders and was caught with chalk in hand. If the worst came to the worst he could deny any knowledge of the apron and admit to defacing the wall with nothing more than a pithy anti-Semitic observation.

On the other hand, he may have chosen a cryptic or ambiguous message out of sheer cussedness. In the aftermath of the Leather Apron business, it would seem rather fitting for a Gentile killer to have conjured up a new association between Jews, blame and an apron, don't you think?

Love,

Caz
X

exactly caz. the problem is that people today are trying to rationalize what a serial killer, 125 years ago would do based on what they think he should have done.
He may have been intentionally cryptic, for his own reasons we don't know, or he may have been intentionally cryptic to, as you say, confuse the police, or the message he wrote may have been perfectly clear in his own mind etc.

just cause we don't get it, dosnt mean he didn't write it.

[Michael W Richards]

I suppose in terms of the specific question the thread poses, it would be reasonable to assume that DB and SJ did mean something... to their author anyway...increased paper sales and hence more dinero for him,...but the GSG's meaning, aside from having an undeniable anti-Jew undertone, has been harder to sort out.

Based on the words at face value it could be a message from a witness who knew that some Jews were trying to evade blame for something, or that somehow they would evade blame. Which suggests that somewhere in the process of sorting out the truth of an incident, perhaps the Berner Street murder for example .....some support mechanism... pro-Jew..... would be introduced and exonerate them from blame.

Maybe those mechanisms are the club witness stories which portray the club as a victim of the random knife slasher, ....that they were utterly innocent of any wrongdoing. Even though the murder happened on their property, with only the members and meeting stragglers on that same property. Maybe its a reluctance by the local authorities to specifically blame criminal acts on Jew or any other ethnic group. At least in public. Maybe a fear of reprisals.

Anyone who believes that any of the police in London in 1888 were comfortable with the growing mass of poor humanity that was in the East End is fooling themselves, they feared revolution. Not just the police either.

Cheers

[caz]

Hi Mike,

Doesn't the whole Leather Apron business rather go against your argument that the authorities were reluctant to be seen trying to blame Jews for criminal activity?

Love,

Caz
X

[Michael W Richards]

Hi Mike,

Doesn't the whole Leather Apron business rather go against your argument that the authorities were reluctant to be seen trying to blame Jews for criminal activity?

Love,

Caz
X

I believe what the Leather Apron "business" reveals Caz is a predisposition by the general public, press and the police to some extent to suggest that local crimes were somehow related to the influx and over abundance of immigrant Jews and anarchists in the area, and the unusual manner in which the police allowed Pizer to publicly clear his name, in the middle of an Inquest, suggests that they were intent on playing down any assumed relationship between the crimes and the aforementioned population segment.

I think that attitude is still present when considering why the GSG was unfortunately erased before it could be imaged.

There were 2 serious public safety issues with riling the local Jewish population....1 would be retaliation based on a perceived insult by Jews...many who already had had violent clashes with the police during peaceful demonstrations, another would be the gentile population blaming immigrant Jews for almost everything wrong with their society at that time.

The only comments I can recall by an official that might incite those kinds of hatreds were made by Anderson.

Cheers Caz

[sepiae]

cussed blame

Hi Pinky,

If he only wrote the message after taking the trouble to clean up, stash the knife and organs and drop the apron quickly when nobody was about, all that care would have been for nought if he claimed the murders and was caught with chalk in hand. If the worst came to the worst he could deny any knowledge of the apron and admit to defacing the wall with nothing more than a pithy anti-Semitic observation.

On the other hand, he may have chosen a cryptic or ambiguous message out of sheer cussedness. In the aftermath of the Leather Apron business, it would seem rather fitting for a Gentile killer to have conjured up a new association between Jews, blame and an apron, don't you think?

Love,

Caz
X

Hi Caz,

you mean he'd have wanted to lead investigations 'back' to aprons and Jews because he might have been fitting the gentile description?
But aprons were never completely dropped, nor was any group out of consideration.
And why, if so, being cryptic? Him merely being stubborn doesn't really explain this.
We should keep in mind that the actually decisive factor in this graffito gaining any significance at all was PC Long. Just imagine what would have happened if Long had glanced at this rather tiny graffito, a few paces away from the piece of apron, glanced at it, frowned briefly, and then forgot all about it - imagine what would have happened.
Nothing.
I concur with what Ally Ryder once said in one of the podcasts, I believe it was the one directly related. If JtR really wanted to leave messages, a room with four walls and plenty of blood available for writing, that would just have been the place.
Even with respect to a probably altogether different mind-set, for lack of a most appropriate term, all aim and purpose could have been blown more easily than not, given the size and the contents of the graffito.

Greetz,

sepiae

[sepiae]

cluemess

Hi everyone,

this being the most recent thread concerning the Goulston St. graffito and me having read through it, it is as good as any for the purpose of venting

What is the number 1 reason for the graffito being considered a clue? Still, 126 years later.
It's PC Long.
Imagine what impact it would have had if good Alfred would have glanced at it briefly, perhaps being a little puzzled, before returning to his search for a possible other victim after having found a piece of bloody apron. Imagine if he'd not given the writing a 2nd thought.
The impact would have been - no impact at all. Just a little writing on a brick. Note: a brick, not brick wall, it was on a brick. It was weeny-tiny. We don't know how many graffiti were around, but there were graffiti. People didn't have twitter back then. And there were many Jews in the neighbourhood. In fact, in that very house.

So PC Long found that piece of apron, and he made several paces - if you only make 2 paces, you can already debate whether this means apron and writing were in immediate distance from another.
The writing fit on a single brick, so it was very small indeed. If one wanted to make an impression, would one really choose to write in such tiny letters?
If he wanted to leave a message, why indeed so cryptic, if this really seems cryptic to anyone? As with the size, the contents, too, would have a better chance to be brought into context with something completely different than with the murderer - it is but pure chance that it was brought into context with the murder . If a message writer, with a message important enough to scribble on a wall, on a brick, where ever, while he's supposed to make his escape, one would assume that he'd mention, at least in passing, something about the murders, or himself, or something unfavourable about women...?
While he did appear to be rather careless as with the locations of the murders and his conduct during the crimes, he did nonetheless manage to get away rather smoothly. Is it really convincing that he'd stop to write cryptic little messages while making his escape?
If the man we call JtR really was a message writer, and if the killer of Catherine Eddowes was the same man who killed Mary Kelly [I still do believe it] then he had 4 good walls at his disposal there, and plenty of blood in case he didn't have chalk on him. Yet, no messages, neither cryptic nor clear.

I keep having this comical image in my head, the perp fleeing the premise of the last murder, but it dribbles down, so he takes shelter for a moment, getting bored, takes out a bit of chalk, starts doodling, 'The Je..., wait, how d'you spell that again...'

Or I imagine the original author of the graffito, a man of mixed feelings:
'Gosh, just wrote this lil bit to vent myself, now it's getting famous... They'll probably discussing it in a 100 years still. If they only knew
Wait a sec... might be better they don't, otherwise I might be in a bit of a pickle, if they start getting handwriting samples from everyone here...'

There are good alternative scenarios for the origin of the graffito that have nothing to do with our perp.
There are plenty of objections that make a connection between it and our perp highly and extremely improbable.
There's only one good reason for its fame and infamy, and it's not the approximation to the piece of apron. It's PC Long.