Where Jack got his Start?

[diana]

Both Dahmer and Rader started on animals. The story in the link is cause for alarm, not just for animal lovers. http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/06/11/...led/index.html

I wish we could access the records of the RSPCA for the 1800's. There might be a valuable clue there.

[A.R.Smith]

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised. Another trait I also wouldn't be surprised to find lurking in His Supreme Nastiness' childhood is injuring/abusing/torturing other children on a psychological and physical level, not nessecarily a sexual manner. He always struck me as someone who needed to be in control, someone who had pehaps a bit of an inferiority complex, again, not nessecarily in a sexual sense. That's just my theory, however.

[babybird67]

brings back bad memories

my children had a friend at primary school in England where we used to live. He came round for tea and tortured our hamster to death. No apology or anything from the parents. I dread to think what he will turn into.

[diana]

They got him. I'm waiting to see what makes this character tick. His eyes are cruel. I have to say that this guy bothers me a lot because I am a cat lover. I am owned by two cats.

http://www.justnews.com/news/19747620/detail.html

[perrymason]

I think the evidence in Polly Nichols murder, Annies and Kates suggest a man that had opened cadavers before, and could recognize organs. But I dont see animals other than pigs having relevance to that knowledge he displays. They are quite similar in internal organs and structures to humans.

Best regards

[Johnr]

Started Out Mutilating pigs...?

It's funny this thread should have been started, because I have been a long-time studier of Montague Druitt's career.

I found it interesting to be reminded (a) two modern serial killers started out mutilating animals and (b)The closest animal anatomy-wiseto humans, are pigs.
[


B]Montague Druitt's family had close connections with Dorset relatives (on his mother's side?) named Homer. These people were wealthy pig-farmers.[/B]

They were large land-holders, and won grand prizes for the quality of their pigs.

It occurred to me that Montague might have holidayed with his Homer relatives on their Dorset pig farm......
Now, if he were Jack the Ripper, and given the pointer earlier in this thread that at least two modern serial killers got their earlier "kicks" out of torturing and mutilating animals....One wonders just how Montague's relatives would have re-acted to a sudden spate of pig-slaughters?
Would they have written a strong confidential letter to his parents? And packed him off back home?
Were there newspaper reports of a sudden spike in pig mutilations around the Homer Dorset farm?
Or around Montague's child-hood Wimborne? Or when he was at Winchester? Did the school have a farm? I recall Montague's brother William, inherited a farm on his father's death...
Oh the questions!...... JOHN RUFFELS.

[lynn cates]

sharp education

Hello. Not to mention that Druitt had surgeons in the family. It has elsewhere been suggested that Montague had some initial medical background. If true, it might entail anatomy lessons and dissection. So this could represent some of his education in things sharp.

Besides the dead pigs, I wonder how the family would have reacted to finding a stash of pornography (or bloody clothes and a knife)? Would they consider him sexually insane? I wonder how Mr. Valentine would react to such a pornography stash?

lynn cates

[Fisherman]

Considering how many people were involved in the many aspects of animal farming, we will have plenty of potential Jacks!

Let´s not loose track of the fact that it is cruelty to animals that is the key factor here. And as far as I know, no such thing has ever been recorded in Druitts case.

Another aspect of the ongoing discussion is that it can be challenged whether pigs enter into the equation here. I am not sure of this, and so I welcome any comments!

Pigs, cows, sheep and chickens are animals that only rarely make the headlines when it comes to people killing animals. On the other hand, cats, dogs, rabbits and horses frequently do. From one of the posts on the thread we can also see that not even hamsters can feel safe...!

Is it not true that the latter category all represent animals that are very often creatures that represent close connections to humans, who tend to them and give them identities of their own, involving names and such? Loved, individualized pets and animals, as it were?

Could it be that these animals are to some extent stand-ins for the real McCoy; humans? Are the animal slayings representative of a practicing ground? Or do the perpetrators simply want to shock? The triumvirate of factors that are supposed to link into a career as a potential killer is often given as:
1. Cruelty to animals
2. Setting things on fire
and
3. Childhood bed-wetting

I cannot really decide where to take this hunch. Maybe there has been work done on the issue, I don´t know. It´s just a feeling I have, and I would - once again - welcome any commenting input!

The best,
Fisherman

[perrymason]

Its my understanding that Bradford was close to farming communities at that time, I dont know the local geographical history well so, hope thats correct....... anyway, there is a murder in Bradford at the time of the Ripper crimes, a young boy cut in half and stuffed into a barrel...with his boots on his chest.

There was some heightened interest obviously due to the spate of slayings in East London..but no link other than the nature of the crime.....like the Torso killings.....not just killers but dehumanizing the remains.

Ill bet there was a link with animals....but perhaps not cruelty. Im sure on farms many young men had to learn about slaughtering pigs and cows for practical reasons....if a guy like Jack also explored with his knife beyond that I wouldn't be surprised.

Cheers all.

[Johnr]

An Australian Animal Torturer Who Segued Into A Horrible Person Mutilator

You are going to think I am winding you all up with my last post and this one.

But no.

At work today, my colleagues, who represent a room full of mostly males of varying ages were all discussing a show on T.V. the night before..The immediate group, twenty.
Apparently as I sat at my P.C. oblivious, a documentary screened on Sydney's Channel 7 about an Australian female abbatoirs worker named, Kathy Knight.
She worked as a "boner" in a meatworks in the country. Processing cattle and sheep.Killing them then and cutting them up professionally.
She discovered that she could cause her sheep victims to suffer agony if she knicked a certain artery and let them bleed slowly to death!
She also discovered that she subsequently "got off" or experienced a "frisson" when she noticed the complete horror and fear on the faces of her solidly built, muscley, male fellow workers. A feeling of power!
At home where her apparently drunken and abusive male partner kept a pet Dingo (an Australian native dog), she shocked him one day when he looked out of the kitchen window to see her actually cutting the throat of his treasured pet!
She then killed her partner and using her abbatoir skills, skinned his entire body; cut off his head and boiled it in a saucepan on the kitchen stove; and served it up with entrails on her children's dinner plate!!!!
At her trial, she did not plead insanity. The "experts" said she was completely sane the whole time. And was given a long custodial sentence. She knew what she was doing.

So. How about that?
I have not invented any of this story.
I have not yet checked to see if it is on the "Net. If it is, I'll post a link. JOHN RUFFELS.

[Sam Flynn]

Considering how many people were involved in the many aspects of animal farming, we will have plenty of potential Jacks!

Not only that, Fish, but domestic slaughter of animals was rather common back in the day. My grandparents, and some of their neighbours, would keep one or two pigs in the back garden, which they'd kill, butcher and use for food and an extra source of income. We aren't talking about farming stock here - nor indeed a dynasty of medics and barristers - but ordinary working-class folk living in a row of terraced cottages.

[BryNY]

I think, more than having to do with just animal cruelty as some sort of inborn predisposition, it has to do with desensitization. Once you've done something that you think is going to be awful (with me it's ride rollercoasters) and you realize it's not as bad as you thought it would be, it becomes easier and easier to do. This sort of supports the theory of escalation as well.

This may also be why studies show that children who grow up around domestic violence are more likely to commit the same violence against their partners when they are grown up or why children who were sexually abused often abuse other children.

The things that most of us think of as horrific and that we would be unable to do in a million years, would probably be a lot easier for us to contemplate if we were slowly desensitized to the idea of them through things like cutting up animals, as Jeffery Dahmer did and this cat killing kid have done.

As someone who grew up in a neighborhood in New York that had a long and notorious history of gangsterism, I watched people I grew up with become desensitized to extreme acts of violence. I'm extremly thankful that I grew up with a great family and was never given the opportunity to become like other people I saw but I am desensitized to some things, like the sound of gunfire. About a month ago a guy was shot and killed in front of my building and neither the sound of the shots or the NYPD detectives knocking in my door in the middle of the night fazed me at all. When I left the apartment the next day, I stepped over the trail of blood outside without much thought and went about my day. So long story short I see how exposure in certain things can serve to desensitize people and make extremely cruel acts easy for them to perpetrate.

P.S. By the way, this is my first ever post on the forum, and I just wanted to say that I think the research and writing on the Ripper case, that many of those participating on the forum and the podcast have done is really excellent and I hope to be able to contribute in meaningful way to the discussions.

[Johnr]

Well said BryNY,
Your first post was a beauty.
Clear, sensible,and with some useful insights.
Also, we will all never become desensitised to nice compliments so keep 'em coming.
JOHN RUFFELS.

[Fisherman]

"Your first post was a beauty"

Agreed, John! Some interesting thoughts there, Bryan!

In this context, one may perhaps mention the work done on the correlation inbetween televison violence and real ditto. When television was introduced here in Sweden in the mid 50´:s, there were many peopla warning against the violence portrayed in some shows. Nothing, though, happened to violence rates.
But that was initially. Later work on the subject has shown that an escalation of violence actually did take place, but not until some fifteen years after the tv introduction. It has been argued that those who had been brought up according to societal norms saying that you are not supposed to kick in your neighbours teeth, stayed by the norms, but many young people who grew up with the violence gradually took the message about it on board. That would seem to correlate to some extent with what you are saying, although one must of course stress that the individual degrees of adjusting to violence differ very much.

My main interest, though, as shown in an earlier post, lies in the suggestion that the violence that fledgling criminals and killers subject animals to, may be more or less directed to the human part of society. The animals are maimed and tortured, but the true target is the value scale of the people living in the same society.

Now, let´s just hope that Sam does not step in and speak about psychobabble here ...!

The best, and welcome to the boards, Bryan!
Fisherman

[Sam Flynn]

Now, let´s just hope that Sam does not step in and speak about psychobabble here ...!

I don't mind sensible, balanced psychobabble with a grounding in reality, Fish - it's when dodgy psychobabble is used to justify a flimsy case against some poor sod or other that I lose the will to live

Excellent first post, Bryan, and welcome to Casebook.