JtR's Ideal Victim Type

[Fisherman]

Brians?

I´ll skip the fight, though, Ben!

The best,
Fisherman

[Edward]

Jack was cunning

Hello All –
I prefer the term “cunning”. I believe that Jack was cunning. Not necessarily book smart. No high IQ required. Street smart and bold enough to successfully carry out the deeds and escape. A case for “luck” can be made because Jack seems to have had a number of close calls and still got away. I also believe that the state of police work in 1888 (forensics, etc.) aided and abetted his success. A culprit had to be practically “caught red-handed” in order to be apprehended. The quick, accurate assessment of the odds of being successful without getting caught fits right in with the term cunning.

Jack reminds me of coyotes that live in close proximity to humans. They know how to go about their business of picking off pets (cats and small dogs) without being caught. Opportunistic, for sure. Cunning enough to perform the act, avoid being witnessed and to escape quickly. I believe that Jack’s ideal victim was a near perfect convergence of opportunity and the availability of weak, drunk (or hung over) degraded women unable to mount much of a defense.

I don’t believe that he pre-selected each victim because most of the victims prostituted themselves “on occasion” out of need. Most of them were not sporadically (intermittently?) trolling for “johns”. He was definitely driven, but by what is anybody's guess.

Edward

[caz]

Jack reminds me of coyotes that live in close proximity to humans. They know how to go about their business of picking off pets (cats and small dogs) without being caught. Opportunistic, for sure. Cunning enough to perform the act, avoid being witnessed and to escape quickly. I believe that Jack’s ideal victim was a near perfect convergence of opportunity and the availability of weak, drunk (or hung over) degraded women unable to mount much of a defense.

Hi Edward,

I agree with this - very much so in fact. But I doubt that a bold and opportunistic "coyote", however street smart and cunning, gets it right every time, holding himself back until he has the ideal cat or dog cornered in an ideal location. There must be the odd occasion when he acts on impulse and picks the wrong pet in the wrong place, biting off more than he can chew and escaping before he can be cornered.

Love,

Caz
X

[Defective Detective]

I'm of the opinion that pigeonholing serial killers into concise niches, as is largely the past-time of modern profiling, is a wasted effort. Many serial killers had multiple motives for doing what they did.

Take Richard Trenton Chase, the "Vampire of Sacramento". He was interviewed in prison after capture by Robert Ressler, and told Ressler that he was driven to kill by the belief that alien Nazis were turning his blood to powder and that he needed to ingest blood to keep it liquefied - a classic 'mission-driven' delusion. But he also admitted that he couldn't ejaculate until his victims were disemboweled, which would peg him squarely as a lust killer were it not for his delusions. No one typology fully encompasses his crimes. While some have suggested that Chase exaggerated his delusions for effect, the wards of the psychiatric hospital he was interred in before his crimes attested to his taste for the blood of live animals. And there's certainly no way at all anyone would look at his killings without knowing his responsibility for them and say, "Oh, this guy must feel the need to drink blood to sustain himself from an alien threat."

So it could also be with the Ripper. It's entirely possible that he was driven by base carnal desire, but justified it to himself via either hallucinatory delusions or sheer misogyny. Any attempt to deduce his mental state based on victimology alone is fraught with the possibility of failure. We're not even sure that prostitutes were his ideal victim: he could have wanted to 'rip... whores' in particular for some personal reason relating to their career of choice, or he could have targeted them just because they were convenient. It's all a big question mark.

[YankeeSergeant]

Victim type

Nichols, Chapman and Eddowes were of a type physically. IN fact the resemblence is noticible if not strikiing. Stride and Kelly are the outliers. Stride was slender and Kelly was younger but does that mean anything. I tend to believe as a couple of others here have stated that he was cunning and opportunistic. I think if we ever find out who Jack was we'll all exclaim, "That guy? Really?!"