Practicality or madness?

[Fisherman]

Ah, I thought as much, Christer. Knowing how you see what was done to Kelly, might it have to do with meticulousness?

I am really not ready to spill the beans yet, Frank. Sorry.

[John G]

hi John
yes this is definitely a kick to the one man theory, and one of the reasons why im not 100% convinced they were the same man. Point taken.
However, I think hebbert was a product of his times, and they simply didn't have the experience of what history has taught us about serial killers and the extent that they can do things very differently some times based on their personal circs and he certainly wasn't familiar with the offensive dismemberer type, so that may cloud his judgement somewhat.
But as I said point taken.

Hi Abby,

Thanks. I accept your point about Dr Hebbert, and he was obviously not a criminologist. However, for me, the most important issue highlighted is that the Torso perpetrator was skilled JTR unskilled.

I think there is little doubt that Kelly was hacked to pieces, and that crates another serious problem, quite apart from the skill.

Thus, as well as defensive dismemberers there are aggressive and offesive and, psychologically, they are completely different. I'm mot aware of a single perpetrator who was both aggressive and offensive, and no such cases occurred in the UK from 1985-2017 based on tbe Rutty statistics.

There is no doubt that what happened to Kelly was aggressive mutilation, i.e. with an extreme level of overkill.

None of the Torso dismemberments reflect an aggressive dismemberment, although offensive may be argued. However, an offensive dismemberer often mutilates the sexual regions, although the only clear indication of this in the Torso cases is Liz Jackson, although the issue of the pregnancy complicates matters. Nonetheless, I feel it could be argued that the Torso perpetrator was an offensive defensive dismemberer (I don't think he was completely defensive.)

Of course Dr Phillips seemed to think skill was apparent in respect of Chapman but this is a controversial view. Dr Bond disagreed and Trevor 's experts are clearly perplexed by this view, concluding that the victim could not have been eviscerated at the scene of crime with the level of skill implied by Dr Phillips' comments.

[FrankO]

Itīs that matter that I am not willing to give away yet, Frank - but there is very good reason to believe these two murders are closely connected. Iīm sure somebody will see it sooner or later, it really is not hard at all. But for now, I am clamming up about it.

Ah, I thought as much, Christer. Knowing how you see what was done to Kelly, might it have to do with meticulousness?

[Fisherman]

Why is that, Christer, if I may ask?

Itīs that matter that I am not willing to give away yet, Frank - but there is very good reason to believe these two murders are closely connected. Iīm sure somebody will see it sooner or later, it really is not hard at all. But for now, I am clamming up about it.

[Fisherman]

What are the catalysts for modern day serial killers to have changed their activities, methods and even victim types? Fear of being caught by the repetition, by forensics, fear of having prey get away because they sense something is happening just like they have read about. Lots of reasons..including desires to try other methods, victim types, locations, etc....

So, which reason do people have for the man who kills strangers working the streets so he can cut into their abdomens suddenly decide to just cut someone once, or attack someone in their bed and empty their bodies of organs and tissue? Place the viscera around the body. Whats the catalyst? Im curious.

Bear in mind that after Pollys murder which was almost identical in nature to Annies and within 2 weeks of it, nothing significant changed. Same Victimology, same MO, same double cuts, same abdominal focus pm. And they had nothing on him. Zero evidence. So..his catalyst for changing is.....

Again, there are many more commonalities between Chapman and Jackson than there are between Chapman and Nichols. You seem unwilling to comment on that?

[Fisherman]

You say you prefer evidence then present a case for a whole slew of unalike killings without anything but your "gut" feelings...are you reading your own posts pal?

Which are the two cases that I think have the same originator and that you find most unalike, Michael?

Name them, and I will give my reason for coupling them. But please donīt resort to the "He thinks Lechmere did all the murders in Victorian London" thing because we really need to do a lot better than that.

[Fisherman]

Of course there are Fisherman. Both men used knives. Both men killed in London in the LVP. Both men killed women.

I was speaking of the damage inflicted. You seem to find some sort of satisfaction claiming that there were no similarities in that field?

[Fisherman]

We must have different meanings attached to the word ‘mindset’, Christer, because I see Bundy’s mindset leading up and through the sorority house attacks in Florida as quite different from the one leading up to most of his previous murders. He needed his high and he needed it badly, so he got it by settling for a riskier approach. But at least it was an approach he had successfully used before. What I find interesting about this change is that it very much seems to have come about because of the fact that he hadn’t killed for 2.5 years and that he claimed that he’d intended to refrain from killing.

I hope you agree that the sorority attacks would have looked totally disorganized, Frank?

As for the grounds you identify, they sound likely enough. Sure frustration can have played a role. Then again, I believe Bundy stayed in the vicinity of the sorority house for some time before he struck, and he seems to have staked the house out, planning an attack. I am a bit flustered by how he did not find the time to go a little bit more subtly about it when the time came.

Then again, thatīs just speculation on my behalf. Letīs move with your suggestion, leading us to when you say...

If Torso man and the Ripper are to be one and the same, this is the kind of external motive for change I’d be looking for. Something important must have happened in his situation, not only causing him to, temporarily, change his MO, but also considerably pick up the pace at which he struck. Obviously, what happened with Bundy isn’t the case with TM & the Ripper, because it seems the Whitehall victim was killed around the time that Nichols and Chapman were killed.

Here we go: Something important must have lain behind a change between the Torso killing pattern and the Ripper ditto, you say. Perhaps so - but what would the killer regard as "important"? To you, having been forced to a 2,5 year hiatus would perhaps have been a powerful enough factor - but it would not explain why the Whitehall case appeared in the middle of the Ripper fury.

Okay. Then letīs talk about the so called Golden State killer, Frank. When he raped fifty women as the East Area rapist, he suddenly changed his ways. From having been an attacker of women living on their own, he suddenly started to attack couples, having the woman tying up her man and then raping her. And we know the reason - at a public meeting and (I think) in the papers, he was spoken about as a coward who would never dare to take on a man.
And lo and behold, what happens?

The factor behind this radical change in how he chose his victims was how his ego could not stand having been called a coward. Nothing more dramatic that that. But apparently, it was "important" enough for him, right? And not only to do it once - he would normally always attack couples afterwards, with, I believe, few exceptions. It even stretched into his killing spree some time afterwards.

So! Letīs put DeAngelo on the streets of London and let him overhear how people say that the Torso killer is a coward for abducting women and killing them in a secure abode. He does not dare to face down the people on the streets, for they would have showed him!

Can you see where I am going with this, Frank? Something that would seem trivial to you and me may have been anything but trivial to a killer such as the one we are looking at. All it takes is an overinflated ego - and those are thirteen a dozen with serial killers.

What if the killer simply dared the people of London with the Ripper killings? What if he was less careful with their bodies than with the bodies he cut when having all the control? What if he thought he had made his point after the ten week spree of Ripper killings?

Of course, this is just a suggestion of mine, there may have been a thousand other explanations behind it. And as far as I understand, they need not be very dramatic, like two and a half years of pressure cooking.
We do not know which of the explanations is the correct one. But one IS, because it IS the same killer, as given away by the character of the similarities. That, at least, is very clear and simple to me.

If you would care to, Frank, I would like to hear what you think the Torso killers mindset was - and what the Ripper mindset was. In which ways do you think they must have differed? You see, to me both mens mindset was quite simply to procure a woman to kill so as to allow them to cut into the body post-mortem, and do what they wanted to it.

[Fisherman]

hi John
yes this is definitely a kick to the one man theory, and one of the reasons why im not 100% convinced they were the same man. Point taken.
However, I think hebbert was a product of his times, and they simply didn't have the experience of what history has taught us about serial killers and the extent that they can do things very differently some times based on their personal circs and he certainly wasn't familiar with the offensive dismemberer type, so that may cloud his judgement somewhat.
But as I said point taken.

Letīs look att Hebbert and what he says again:

"These outrages were done by more than one man, the post-mortem examination showing very clearly that in one series the motive was the destruction of the identity of the person, and concealment of the crime. In the second, savage and singularly purposeless mutilation. The examination also proved the difference in skill and intention of the operator. In the first series, as I may put it, the women's bodies were skilfully divided into sections such as might be done by a butcher or a hunter, evidently for the purpose of easy carriage and distribution...in the other series, the women were horribly and unmercifully mutilated. Even the internal organs 2had been removed and taken away."

To begin with, Hebbert takes it upon himself to identify the aim of the cutting done. Ergo, he puts the torso attacks down to a wish to destroy the identity of the victim and conceal the crime. This is a Victorianism - they knew of no other possible reason for dismemberment. What Hebbert does NOT do is to tell us why the abdomen was cut from sternum to groin, why a heart and a uterus was taken, why named clothes were left on a body, why the parts were dumped in places where they would be found and so on - all the things where we can see that the torso killer was an offensive mutilator, with a yearn to have his work recognized. Such a creature was unknown to the victorians. If they had known about the condition, they would have seen things very differently.

He then calls what happened to the Ripper victims savage and singularly purposeless mutilation - and he is once again totally wrong, if you ask me. Itīs all that crap about the Kelly murder being about an annihilation of the body, whereas I think there is ample reason to see it as a strictly methodical and very controlled.

Next: he says that the first series was about skilfully dividing the bodies into sections, and once again he omits to add that it was ALSO about taking out a uterus, about cutting away the abdominal walls, about slicing the abdomen open from top to bottom, about excising a heart - and he forgets to add that there was cutting in the Ripper series that was also deemed skilled by medicos. To top things off, he even says with indignation that the Ripper murders "even" involved the taking out of organs - as if the Torso murders did not!

By now, we can see that the grounds for telling the series apart are - at best - very weak. And we can see that he tells the series apart on grounds that were never there!

Moving on to what he says about Kelly:

"A woman was killed in a room. After the most frightful mutliation and destruction of the body...There was nothimg to suggest any knowledge of anatomy or surgical skill. In fact, he had evidently attempted to remove the heart by cutting the ribs, and failing to do this, he had dragged it down through the midriff."

...it is more of the same. He only sees destruction, and I think that would have offended the killer very much, after all the work he put in. Trying to exemplify, he paints a picture where the killer tried to cut through the ribs to get at the heart, and failing to achieve this, he instead "dragged it down through the midriff". I onder what the Ripperologists who suggest that the Ripper was a disciple of Rudolf Wirchoff thinks about that...? I believe that what Hebbert claims to be at attack on the ribs is what Bond described as the killer having cut the intercostals between three ribs, meaning that he cut away the flesh between the ribs. This could have been done, as Jon Smyth has suggested, to enabale the killer to see the heart as he cut it loose from itīs appendages - in which case we have a meticulous and clever cutter at work. Personally, I think there may have been another reason, and that the intercostals can have been opened up at a stage where the heart had already been removed. In that case, too, it would have had nothing to do with a clumsy effort to cut through the ribs with a knife.

Hebbert is a very competent doctor when it comes to the practical matters of his profession. Trying his hands at psychological profiling, he fails miserably, to a large degree depending on the time he worked in.

[Abby Normal]

That's exactly what I mean, Harry. It's a bit hard to imagine that the nights of the Ripper murders were the only nights in 15 years that Torso man didn't have access to this private place. But even if we suppose the change in approach was due to the non-availability of the place, it wouldn't account for the higher frequency of the murders.

how do you know that? perhaps the ripper killings didnt satiate him as much as his chop shop kills? ripper kills a quick escalation culminating in the indoor kelly kill. then hes satiated a bit and nothing more till pinchin and mackenzie

[Abby Normal]

That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Surely the killer didn’t have unrestricted access to his chop shop, so why do we only see a spate of outdoor murders in a couple months of 1888? Particularly when his bloodlust had only recently been satiated with the Whitehall victim?

a lot of things don't make sense with serial killers harry. they go in fits and spurts all the time. thats why I brought up bundy sorority spree.

[Abby Normal]

Hi Abby,
I more or less said that Torso man could have changed to another approach, but if he did, then it has to be something like what happened with Bundy: he hadn’t killed for 2.5 years (because he was in jail) and was unable to restrain himself once he’d broken out (perhaps also due to the stress he experienced as a fugitive), even though he claimed he had decided to stay away from criminal activity.

We know this sort of situation doesn’t apply to Torso man & the Ripper, as the former killed the Whitechapel victim around the time Nichols & Chapman were killed. For this same reason and the fact that he seems to have stored the body of the Rainham victim for some months and the fact that there were no other Ripper-type murders in the 15 years since 1873, it also seems quite unlikely to me that the change was brought about because he sometimes didn’t have access to his “chop shop”.

sure it could. he could have killed Whitehall before Nichols and before he lost access to his chop shop. Chop shop available-kills Whitehall. chop shop then not available-kills Nichols and the rest.

[FrankO]

That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Surely the killer didn’t have unrestricted access to his chop shop, so why do we only see a spate of outdoor murders in a couple months of 1888? Particularly when his bloodlust had only recently been satiated with the Whitehall victim?

That's exactly what I mean, Harry. It's a bit hard to imagine that the nights of the Ripper murders were the only nights in 15 years that Torso man didn't have access to this private place. But even if we suppose the change in approach was due to the non-availability of the place, it wouldn't account for the higher frequency of the murders.

[FrankO]

You should not put Kelly beside Jackson, by the way - you should put her beside the 1873 victim.

Why is that, Christer, if I may ask?

[Harry D]

hi harry
I did not. his chop shop is available one day but not the next. if it could be shown they were killed on the same day I would reconsider.

That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Surely the killer didn’t have unrestricted access to his chop shop, so why do we only see a spate of outdoor murders in a couple months of 1888? Particularly when his bloodlust had only recently been satiated with the Whitehall victim?