Where Jack got his Start?

[Johnr]

I initially laughed at SJReid's concept of an "idiot savant" serial killer.
Sort of like "The Rainman" with a knife?
But later comments about such a candidate's "cunning" rather than professional qualifications in cadaver quartering, made me think again.
Yes, the Ripper certainly must have had cunning and luck!
These two factors would have added to his/her drive and determination to complete yet another "job".
Perhaps I was a little unkind to Gareth. After all, it was Fisherman who first suggested most farmers are/were potential Rippers.Sorry Gareth.
It was also Fisherman who pointed out Europeans have a different attitude to how they treat domestic animals like pets: cats, dogs and hamsters.
And how they treat working animals like pigs, goats, sheep and sometimes horses.
I also agree with Ashkenaz about the early development of these urges coming through as the McDonald troika.
The psychological torture of fellow school chums is interesting though.
Druitt, for one, was very popular at Winchester. Head boy or something.Was he like "School Bully" in Michael Palin's " Ripping Yarns " series?
A steriotypical bully to younger boys?
And could this - along with cruelty to animals - have been his way of securing "power" over more impressionable classmates?
Yes, Lynn, we are like-thinkers. Druitt certainly could have absorbed some sort of medical knowledge. He was regarded as bright and promising at school.
Did he keep in contact with his Uncle Robert Druitt, a luminary in London's medical circles to help him if he wanted to do study medicine?
Diana deserves a prize for starting this thread. In my opinion. JOHN RUFFELS.

If the man referred to as Jack only really killed 2 or perhaps 3 women Stan, would we still want to put some label like "cunning", or 'idiot savant" on him?

To my eye if JtR only killed 2 women,.... equally as possible and I believe more plausible than he definitely killed only 5...., then he needed to be nothing but somewhat familiar with anatomy and unaffected by the resulting gore caused by his actions. He could have been so ordinary and so lucky on the nights he did kill. And by late Fall his acts would be among many acts that he was being accused of, which had a cumulative effect of suggesting a profile that was unlike himself. Someone "cunning"....or an idiot savant, who had a very low IQ but a natural "knack" for the tasks.

If "Jack" only killed say Polly and Annie......then really how clever was he? Clever enough to change venues whens the first didnt allow him enough time, and clever enough to extricate abdominal organs in the early dawn. But no phantom menace or the like.

Maybe just a few small, specific, acts.

That need not require animal field studies beforehand.

Cheers all

[Roy Corduroy]

Good one, Stan. That's gonna be hard to top.

[sdreid]

Perhaps he didn't need a start, that is, he just was. In other words, he was a sort of criminal idiot savant.

[lynn cates]

allies

Hello. Mr. Ruffles, I think we are allies!

LC

[Fisherman]

Sam writes:

"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 "

That stance of yours, Sam, is probably grounded on something that happened inbetween you and your parents back in your pre-teen years. Could have something to do with a fear of insects or small birds, perhaps...??

The best,
Fisherman

[Johnr]

Are All Farmers Potential Rippers Gareth?

Some good stuff coming out of this discussion. In my opinion.

I have seen lots of good posts by Gareth in the past. I think I have only disagreed with him once concerning those.

But.
I cannot agree that because I suggest more research might reveal Montague Druitt could have displayed one or all of the "McDonald trio"; or displayed extraordinary behaviour towards animals on the Homer pig farm in his childhood, or even towards other pupils at Winchester.....

I know, I know, no evidence of this thus far.

Nor is there evidence -clear detail- of exactly what constituted the "serious trouble" which prompted George Valentine to dismiss an ostensibly respectable lawyer/ teacher from his school.

Let's just turn the argument the other way for once:

Does it not send alarm bells ringing when seemingly reputable people have suggested that not only did Montague Druitt's family privately believe him to be a vicious serial killer, but a long-time professional colleague (Valentine), adjudged his then-current behaviour serious enough, not to give him a warning, but to summarily dismiss him entirely?

These two considerations together should give us pause to think.

Whilst town people are truly shocked at the severe way some country people treat their animals, I do not believe we can tritely suggest this then makes them all potential Jack The Rippers. JOHN RUFFELS.

Desensitization is a interesting concept when applied to these cases, and it always reminds me of whom in that period in that place in that moment in time might likely be desensitized to seeing human beings stripped of flesh, with organs scooped from inside them, and blood and matter all about........in the field of medical science, those kinds of sights were daily fare for students.

Ive seen period photos of anatomy students standing round a dissected person who looked at the time very much like Mary Kelly did in room 13 around 10:45am on the 9th....partially stripped limbs, innards and flesh placed about on trays and tables....

Best regards all.

[Ashkenaz]

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.

Psychologists refer to The McDonald Triad. This is a threefold thing, although it is not dispayed by all serial killers. Usually though, each will have a history of one, two or perhaps all three : torturing animals, fire-setting, bedwetting into the teen years.

So, you may want to consider known child/adolescent arsonists. And also- if available, which I doubt- child/teenage bedwetters.

[Sam Flynn]

Now, letīs 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.

[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 50ī: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, letīs just hope that Sam does not step in and speak about psychobabble here ...!

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.