Practicality or madness?

[Abby Normal]

A boat might make a good bolt hole for this sort of thing. You can also river dump and travel. A bit of a Dexter.

Any elevated position other than horizontal, (such as feet up) will speed up exsanguination. So an incline could work.

JtR with sailor appearance.

If JtR is the torso murderer, then I tend to think we are dealing with a true necrophiliac who keeps a corpse and replaces body parts by harvesting sexual parts from prostitutes. When the trunk is gone, he replaces it and dumps the old one. He would keep the heads.

Mary Shelly's descendants had body parts thrown into their garden.

Hi Batman
Im not sure were dealing with a true Necropheliac with the torso ripper. as a matter of fact I remember a while back someone who had alot of knowledge about psychology and paraphilias argued that people like bundy and green river killer werent true necropheiliacs because eventhough they had sex with corpses they also could have normal sexual relations with living people. the argument was that the technical definition of a true necropheliac is someone who can ONLY have sexual gratification with a corpse. Of course I find that definition absurd. of course Bundy was a necropheliac.

Now, that being said if the ripper took organs back to his bolt hole and masturbated and or derived some kind of sexual pleasure with them (and I think he probably did) then I think he was at least a pseudo necropheliac. (Again as I have stated many times in the past-this is why I hate over reliance on labels and technical definitions.)

torsoman we are not exactly sure if he had sex with the corpses (evidence shows probably not) or kept parts or organs after he killed his victims (probably), so Im even grayer on if torsoman was even a pseudo necropheliac.


If Torsoman and ripper were the same I would venture that there was some kind of sexual gratification going on with body parts and organs.

since we dont really know though (unlike dahmer bundy etc.) its very difficult to say if he was a necropheliac.


But Im thinking that torsoripper (and yes I lean toward they were same man)is probably along the lines of a Dahmer/ Gein/william suff mix.

[Batman]

Yes, Gein kept body parts at his place. No, keeping body parts is not the same as being a necrophiliac. Being a necrophiliac is engaging in sex with dead bodies, not taking them apart.

I was under the impression that you believed that JtR took and kept the parts he harvested from his victims?

As horrible as it may sound, I don't think it is a necessary requirement of necrophiliacs to have a corpse intact. Ted Bundy kept their heads to have sex with them. Kemper, as mentioned, did something to just a head also. Gein, I don't even want to know what he was doing but it seems he was wearing them (hence Buffalo Bill character in Silence of the Lambs).

[Fisherman]

Hi Fish
Interesting and good post.

Who do you think the Torsoripper most compares to other serial killers?
Gein, Dahmer, Kemper?

Planning, arrogant, egotistical, intelligent, self-secure, given to ritualistic behavior, not into physical torture, killing as a means to an end... there are links to elements from many other serial killers, but none of them fit all the traits within the Torsoripper; a bit of Dahmer, a little Cottingham, a splash of Gillis...
Who- and whatever he was, he was an individual and his murders were the works of an individual. If there is no perfect precedent, then that applies to many other serial killers too, like Chase, Chikatilo and Kemper, for example, odd creatures carving out odd "careers" in their criminal lives.

I also think that there may be the mundanest of explanations to what we see as weird matters. I find that is more often than not the case in these matters.

[Sam Flynn]

Instead of getting into knots with labels, which we can argue about forever, why not concentrate on what actually happened?

[Fisherman]

Batman: I was under the impression that you believed that JtR took and kept the parts he harvested from his victims?

Took? Yes. Kept? Who knows? We know some killers do. But there are no musts involved here. If he was after publicity - and the Whitehall case, the Shelley matter, the Kelly deed and many other things make this a very clear possibility - then who is to say that he did not discard the innards immediately after the deeds, once they had played their role? We must be able to identify the greyzone between facts and supposition, otherwise we are at peril to get things very wrong.

As horrible as it may sound, I don't think it is a necessary requirement of necrophiliacs to have a corpse intact. Ted Bundy kept their heads to have sex with them. Kemper, as mentioned, did something to just a head also. Gein, I don't even want to know what he was doing but it seems he was wearing them (hence Buffalo Bill character in Silence of the Lambs).

Yes, Gein made himself a skin costume out of female hide. That denotes a wish to be female but it does not imply necrophilia, Batman!
Bundy? Yes, if he engaged in sex with dead skulls, then that was something I guess could be described as a necrophiliac approach to reliving his murders.
But how do you engage in sex with a kidney? Masturbation? Perhaps, but then we are speaking of ritualistic behavior aimed to relive a murder, and not of necrophilia. Necrophilia is physically engaging in sex with a corpse or parts of the corpse - the latter would be unusual in the extreme, by the way, but the Bundy matter is such an example. From what we can tell about our man, however, there is no necrophilia involved in what he did.

[Fisherman]

Instead of getting into knots with labels, which we can argue about forever, why not concentrate on what actually happened?

By all means. Lead on, Sir!

[Batman]

If there is no perfect precedent, then that applies to many other serial killers too, like Chase, Chikatilo and Kemper, for example, odd creatures carving out odd "careers" in their criminal lives.

This is really interesting because we can point to similarities with other serial killers and it heads in the direction of those with necrophilic tendencies.

Gein is the only time I have ever heard of the term 'vulva' in the plural, 'vulvae' because he kept a box of them.

Chase was a schizophrenic who thought he had to drink people's blood to stay alive. Another example of what he did is with Peter Kurten. The rare condition is called Renfield syndrome, or clinical vampirism.

Kemper is very close to Chase in many ways. He was also a schizophrenic.

Chikatilo is pretty much your lust murderer, say like the Yorkshire Ripper.

I would actually like to know what your comparative case is, but it seems, you don't have one?

[Abby Normal]

Planning, arrogant, egotistical, intelligent, self-secure, given to ritualistic behavior, not into physical torture, killing as a means to an end... there are links to elements from many other serial killers, but none of them fit all the traits within the Torsoripper; a bit of Dahmer, a little Cottingham, a splash of Gillis...
Who- and whatever he was, he was an individual and his murders were the works of an individual. If there is no perfect precedent, then that applies to many other serial killers too, like Chase, Chikatilo and Kemper, for example, odd creatures carving out odd "careers" in their criminal lives.

I also think that there may be the mundanest of explanations to what we see as weird matters. I find that is more often than not the case in these matters.

thanks fish-agree. I need to take another look at Cottingham and Gillis.

I also think that there may be the mundanest of explanations to what we see as weird matters. I find that is more often than not the case in these matters.

yup-I believe it was Chase where they found a victim/s with there entrails kind of spread among tree branches and no one could figure out what the heck was going on with that. When they caught him and asked him it was just so he could stretch them out, and get a better close up look at them-simple curiosity.

[Michael W Richards]

What was missing in the introduction here is how decidedly different Martha's murder was to any of the Canonical murders. One was committed in a heightened state, others were in a very controlled manner.

Whats always missing here when trying to group victims under one killer...or even to add headless dismembered women to the tally..are the specific circumstances of the individual acts and what they reveal about the killer. For example, Annies killer sought to obtain what he did by performing sequential acts that led to the desired conclusion. A clinical cold killer. Marthas killer may well have been frothing at the mouth in fury when he killed. Liz Strides killer need to have only lost his cool for 1 second. Marys killer seems to have been lost, making superfluous cuts that led to no conclusive goal.

Killers don't change entirely from moment to moment. Their character, their inspiration, their choices don't run the gamut from just killing someone to completely destroying them.

[Sam Flynn]

Marys killer seems to have been lost, making superfluous cuts that led to no conclusive goal.

On the contrary, he seems to have purposely de-fleshed both her thighs, her chest and "undercarriage", emptied the entire contents of her abdomen and removed her heart. Sure, there were superflous cuts to her face, but the same applied to Eddowes.

[Fisherman]

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This is really interesting because we can point to similarities with other serial killers and it heads in the direction of those with necrophilic tendencies.

Gein is the only time I have ever heard of the term 'vulva' in the plural, 'vulvae' because he kept a box of them.

Chase was a schizophrenic who thought he had to drink people's blood to stay alive. Another example of what he did is with Peter Kurten. The rare condition is called Renfield syndrome, or clinical vampirism.

Kemper is very close to Chase in many ways. He was also a schizophrenic.

Chikatilo is pretty much your lust murderer, say like the Yorkshire Ripper.

I would actually like to know what your comparative case is, but it seems, you don't have one?

As I said to Abby, I think there are traits present from many serial killers within the presumed Torsoripper. There is no perfect parallel, but then again, there is no perfect parallel to ANY serial killer. They all differ in some ways, more or less so.
It also applies that with identified killers, we can study their minds, but we donīt have any positive identification of the Torsoripper, and so all we can look at is his deeds, and try to interpret them - which may lead us wrong.

[Fisherman]

On the contrary, he seems to have purposely de-fleshed both her thighs, her chest and "undercarriage", emptied the entire contents of her abdomen and removed her heart. Sure, there were superflous cuts to her face, but the same applied to Eddowes.

Bravo, Gareth! I share this view 100 per cent - whoever killed Kelly was purposefully cutting away. I am not in agreement that the cuts to the face were superfluous, however - I think they served a purpose too.

[Batman]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Torso_Murderer

I forgot about this one. Read the book a few decades ago by Steven Nickel.

Unfortunately, the killer was not identified either but there is a prime suspect.

[Fisherman]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Torso_Murderer

I forgot about this one. Read the book a few decades ago by Steven Nickel.

Unfortunately, the killer was not identified either but there is a prime suspect.

Ah, the Mad Butcher! What about him? Was he a necrophiliac? Or?

[Batman]

Ah, the Mad Butcher! What about him? Was he a necrophiliac? Or?

He managed to dump a lot of torsos and he also got his victims from the down & out.

There is nothing pointing directly at necrophilia in this case.

Mad Butcher, killed men and women, but mostly men.