Same motive = same killer

[Fisherman]

What do you mean by abdominal flaps?

What did the medicos mean by flaps? That is the question - I did not invent the word, I use the same vocabulary as the medicos did. And they referred to sections of the abdominal wall. Both Chapman and Kelly lost their entire abdominal walls, more or less. The abdominal wall covers the abdominal viscera, and if it is cut away, the viscera is laid bare to the naked eye.

[Sam Flynn]

and since there is a very clear link between Kelly and the 1873 torso

What very clear link "is" there?

[Fisherman]

You go through all the trouble of dismembering, spreading her parts all over and you are very focused on her private parts but you don't notice the underwear has L.E. Fisher written in it?

He probably tracked down L E Fisher, noted that this was not the victim, and left the underwear behind as a red herring. Clever guy.

[Sam Flynn]

What did the medicos mean by flaps? That is the question - I did not invent the word, I use the same vocabulary as the medicos did. And they referred to sections of the abdominal wall.

Well, yes, but - as I've observed with the "pizza slice" analogy - there are only so many ways to lay open the abdomen, and that the "three flap" approach could have been independently hit upon by any number of killers.

I think I was the first person, many years ago, to draw attention to the "three flap" being a common factor in the Chapman and Kelly murders, and I kind of wish I'd kept my gob shut At any rate, I'm now less inclined to read much significance into this, especially in light of the fact that Eddowes' abdomen was opened more-or-less by a single incision, and that Nichols' abdomen had so many cuts that, had the killer taken it much further, we might have found four, five or more flaps being detached in her case.

[Fisherman]

But what happened to the torso victims before they were dismembered and dumped? They might have been repeatedly raped or otherwise abused for a considerable time before their killers' purposes were served - that's what often happens in these cases. That would be a vastly different motive to those of the Whitechapel murderers. (Notice that I'm using plurals.)

There was no sign of torture on any of the torso victims. Nor was any sign found of any of them having been raped. So no abuse seems to have been at work, Gareth. The parallel cases you speak of are normally cases where the victim is abducted and put through hell before they are killed and dumped. Burn-marks, wounds, abrasions, crush-marks and such are found on them afterwards, telling a grim story of their demise.
The torso killers victims tell the same story as Jacks victims in this respect - neither man was a sadist, and both men made quick business of starting to cut after death.

If there was abuse, there would be signs of abuse. If there was torture it would show. It does not, so your suggestion has to remain a totally unsubstatiated one.

[Fisherman]

Well, I don't think he would have expected the victim to have her name written in her underwear! Not that Fisher was her name anyway.

Yes, that was a bummer.

Ever considered how the killer may have wanted to check, if he was careful?

[Fisherman]

But this is to ignore the fact that other body parts, including lungs, were removed from the Torso victims.

And which organs were removed from Kelly? Among others, the lower part of the right lung, which "was broken and torn away".

Whichever way we look at this, we are stuck with two murder series, where we in BOTH cases have removal of both sexually oriented and non-sexually oriented organs.

If you demand that the exact same organs must be taken away in the exact same fashion in every case, we are left with a series of single murders that all differ. We are left with no Ripper and no torso killer.

I think we must accept that the one and only clincher to look for is whether there are any truly odd ingredients present in BOTH series. And we DO have victims in both series having their rings taken from their fingers. We DO have victims in both series losing sections of their colons. And we DO have victims in both series having their abdominal walls removed in large flaps.

That puts the shared identity beyond reasonable doubt in my eyes.

[Sam Flynn]

If there was abuse, there would be signs of abuse. If there was torture it would show. It does not, so your suggestion has to remain a totally unsubstatiated one.

So why spend time with them and go to such lengths to dispose of their bodies? Surely there must have been something going on. Perhaps the abuse was verbal, and lasted over a long and unhappy relationship or marriage. Another common reason for disposing of anonymised murder victims.

Oh, and by the way, it's perfectly possible that they were tied up and used as a sex slave without any additional torture being necessary.

[Harry D]

If the torso killers had their own premises (whether private residence or secure bolt-hole), why go to someone else's residence in the first place? Why take such a risk?

What if he didn't have permanent access to the premises?

That doesn't answer the second part of the problem, namely why someone so practised with the knife, as seen in the other torso murders, would make such a complete dog's-dinner of butchering Mary Kelly. (Or Eddowes, Chapman and Nichols for that matter.)

Killing & mutilating outdoors, or in the victim's hovel, carried more pressure, perhaps?

[Fisherman]

So you're giving precedence to a doctor who didn't even examine any of the victims, over Drs Philips and Bond, who both saw Torso and JtR victims but did not think the same killer was responsible.

By the way, I disagree that all evisceration cases are offensive mutilations. In respect of the Torso cases we're dealing with dismemberment victims, who's body parts were removed as part of the disposal process.

You just said that the torso killer targetted the foetus in the Jackson case. How is that defensive dismemberment? We know that the uterus was taken out, carved out, from Jackson. In what universe is that defensive dismemberment? The face of the 1873 victim was carved away from the skullbone. How could that ever be considered defensive mutilation? Why would a killer who anted to dispose of a body rip it´s abdomen open from ribcage to pubes? What disposal ends wold that meet?


Gareth tells us that Dennis Nilsen took out the viscera to facilitate disposal. What he forgot to say is that Nilsen cut "his" victims up in miniscule parts, so as to be able to flush them down his toilet - it was when it clogged up he got caught.
That kind of removal of viscera is consistent with a defensive dismemberment - carving out the uterus without having to to enable disposal, is effectively not.

[Fisherman]

So you're giving precedence to a doctor who didn't even examine any of the victims, over Drs Philips and Bond, who both saw Torso and JtR victims but did not think the same killer was responsible.

I am listening to a doctor who was aquainted with the exact appearance of the wounds. And who was a doctor specializing in abdominal surgery.

[Fisherman]

Has there ever been another serial murderer who used 2 completely different methods of disposal/display? I mean 2 clear consistent methods?

1. Kills in the street (MJK apart) and leaves the bodies on display in a twisted sexual pose.
2. Kills indoors, dismembers with skill, packages the body parts, dumps them.

Couldn't the fact that body parts were missing from the Torso's possibly suggest that they were used for medical experimentation (seeing as the cuts were apparently so professionally done?)

At the moment, for me, the two differences that I mention above trump all else by a mile. I just don't see the same man.

There are examples of serialists who sometimes dismember, sometimes not, yes.

[Fisherman]

And, furthermore, having hit upon the infinitely "safer" and sure-fire method of dismemberment and disposal at leisure, why would he suddenly engage in a brief flurry of hugely risky open-air attacks?

Given that serialists with a large number of victims under their belt tend to get more and more cautious, that´s a great point (warning: irony).

When Ted Bundy fled - why did he not go to Mexico and go into hiding? That would have been smarter than it was to kill in the US again, would it not? Why bite one of his victims in the buttock, leaving his toothmarks to send him to the electric chair? Dumb, eh?

Serial killers have over and over again witnessed about how they get to feel invincible, undetectable, God or whatever. We should learn from that.

Why did Kürten use so many different methods to kill, if he had found a working one? Why return to old methods?

Of course it is not to be expected that killers do these kinds of things - but they do nevertheless. And WHEN they do, how fortunate that they sometimes leave traces like cut away abdominal flaps, allowing us to follow their tracks!

[Sam Flynn]

Gareth tells us that Dennis Nilsen took out the viscera to facilitate disposal. What he forgot to say is that Nilsen cut "his" victims up in miniscule parts, so as to be able to flush them down his toilet - it was when it clogged up he got caught.

The main point to take away from that is that there are different reasons for removing organs. It is by no means certain that Jack the Ripper had a particular "fixation" for the uterus, and that his real shtick had more to do with the thrill he got from cutting people open, period. We know for sure that he removed more than just the uterus from his victims and, when given sufficient privacy, he almost completely emptied the corpse of Mary Kelly. Assuming that the torso killers had even more time and privacy at their disposal, why did they content themselves with such a paltry haul of trophies when they could have taken so much more?

[Sam Flynn]

Given that serialists with a large number of victims under their belt tend to get more and more cautious, that´s a great point (warning: irony).

Au contraire, it is an important point. Why a sudden flurry of incautious behaviour between 1887 and 1889, to say nothing of 1873? Why, for that matter, don't we even see a flurry of cautious behaviour between those dates - i.e. more torsos turning up? People are often puzzled (unnecessarily, I think) as to why JTR claimed so few canonical victims, but surely the same applies to "the" Torso Killer; indeed, the small tally of torso victims is even less impressive than JTR's, when one considers we're looking at a time-span of nearly 20 years. What a crap serial killer he was, assuming (a) he was one person; and (b) he was a he.