What are you doing here? I thought this was the terrible three against me only?
Anyways, you are welcome to the shooting gallery!
I will post your thoughts with a few red observations where I think you are a bit premature or wrong.
The MO’s of Torso man and the Ripper clearly differed in one regard. One led the murderer to do as he pleased in privacy and light; the other lead him to fulfill his dark desire out in the streets, where he could be quite sure that he wouldn’t be able to do all that he wished and worked under time pressure and in darkness. That’s a big difference, as it has great influence on being able to satisfy his very driving force.
Here, you are presupposing that you know his driving force, Frank, and I am anything but sure that you do. You also predispose that he would have gone further with the Ripper victims given the time, but I don´t think that necessarily applies either.
I would say that what was done to the Ripper victims tells us what was driving the perpetrator of these murders. After all, he risked his very life doing what he did to them.
But what drove him? Can we know?
His first and foremost interest lay under the skirts of his victims, as that’s the part that he attacked when he had little time.
How would he know that he had little time? He would have time until somebody came along, and that could be ten seconds or ten minutes or half an hour.
He cut the abdomen open and cut out the uterus.
With Eddowes, he took the uterus and the kidney, and carved the face and cut the nosetip off. Since no reports were made about faeces in the facial wounds, it seems they preceded the abdominal carving. Why do you think that was? And why did he take a kidney too if a uterus was his desire?
When he had more time, with Mary Jane Kelly, I have no doubt that we see a lot of the dark fantasy that drove him. He did not only open up her abdomen and cut out her uterus (and other organs), but also cut (off) those parts of the woman that might be considered attractive to a man, i.e. belly, thighs, breasts, arms, legs, face.
So what was this desire? What did it stipulate? And why?
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We see not much of this with at least the last 4 torso victims, who (timewise) were killed closest to the Ripper victims. Only 2 out of those 4 had their abdomen cut open, only 1 of these had her uterus cut out through the opened abdomen and none of them were cut beyond this and the cuts to dismember. This is at least odd, considering Torso man had at least about as much time with his victims as the Ripper spent with Kelly, and, very likely, more. What strikes me is that Jackson looks quite different from Kelly, even though she was killed after Kelly. She had no cut at all on breasts, legs, arms, no fleshy parts that were cut off her body.
I refer to the Ripper murders as Torso light murders. I think that the Ripper murders were slayings where he was not worried about being meticulous or exact because he knew that he would probably be pressed for time. So he set about things quickly and produced sloppier results. But the gist was the same - disassemble the woman into parts in one way or another. He strived, if I am correct, after a result that could only reach near perfection if he had time and seclusion enough to cut meticulously and exactly, the way he did when he took the face off the 1873 victim.
So, as far as I’m concerned, an important question remains: why would a serial killer, with regards to his very driving force, want to settle for less?
Not less - quicker. Kelly was more, not less, remember. And your thinking only works if you have made a correct identification of his driving force. I don´t think you have.
After all, less time would mean less time for whatever it was that drove him. I think this is a viable question, since I have never come across any serial killer case (not that I know them all, mind you) in which the perpetrator went from killing a string of women in privacy (at relative low risk) over a long period to killing a string of women out in the streets (at relative high risk) over the brief period, and in so doing having less time to live out the fantasy that drove him.
There are many examples of killers with a narcissistic thinking who have gotten more and more careless, taking larger and larger risks. Basically, that is what our man does when playing the Rippers role. I would have been more worried about how he goes back to the torso mode instead of developing an increasingly risky MO altogether.
But basically, what you are asking is "Can a killer really do it like that?", and the answer is "Yes, it is obvious since the siilarities give him away."
You say cases where a killer goes from security to risktaking are not to be expected. How expected is it to find two killer in the same town and time with so many baffling similarities, Frank? The cutting of the soft part of the neck and throat, the opening of the abdomen, the taking of the heart, the taking of the uterus, the taking away of the abdominal wall in flaps, the vanishing rings leaving wrench marks on the fingers, the commonality in how no obvious torture was applied , all of these things - how do you explain them? Coincidence?
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