Examination of a Motive

[Errata]

Well Curious, I suspect that he made a commitment to be content with the long lasting heart trophy rather than risk further hunting. He chose to forgo the risky pursuit of genuine pleasure for the much safer contentment offered by the heart of M5, and the anguish relief it provided. Dave

Wow. That has to be the most self-aware serial killer on the planet.

You know what your problem is Dave? An overabundance of literal bones in your body. Come on man, dig deep, grab your inner poet by the cojones, and give us a motive based on speculation and gut feeling.

Was he looking for ways to expand his collection of all things menstrual?

Trying prevent the invasion of raptors in jet-packs?

Come on you scientist. Live a little.

[protohistorian]

O.K. Errata, just because I like you....he was batshit crazy. He had an infected ingrown toenail, and when he stubbed this toe, the nearest woman had to die. Naturally he was socially stigmatized for this which explains why he never stubbed his toe at a gala in the palace and took a try at the queen. Dave

[Errata]

If he had reached this level, why quit?

curious

Well, did he? Maybe he died. Maybe he got locked up.

One of the reasons Mary Kelly has always bothered me is because it is an unsustainable level of violence. She wasn't murdered. She was obliterated. And serial killers don't as a rule downgrade the violence. It's like heroin. Addicts don't use less. They use as much or more. Until they get clean, or it kills them. If we say that Eddowes was a prelude to Kelly, that means an Eddowes level of mutilation was no longer enough. I suppose it's possible that he considered Kelly to have been too much, but it seems terribly unlikely. So then he has escalated, like serial killers do. If he is going to continue killing, he has to shift his victim criteria. Women he can guarantee to have a long time with. So either in the middle of nowhere, or women with rooms, like Kelly. But both of those really limit the victim pool. But we know that serial killers go to insane lengths to get who they want, how they want. He would then be taking insane risks that would get him caught. And yet serial killers do it all the time.

It feels as though if Mary Kelly's murderer was a serial killer, that level of violence would be sustained, or increased. So maybe he stopped, but that typically doesn't take. Maybe he died, which does. Or maybe Kelly was not a victim of a serial killer. And maybe the exponential leap in mutilation was not just due to privacy, but due to an intense and personal motive.

Conversely, if we take Mary Kelly out of the picture, the crimes become more sustainable, arguing for more victims. It also makes Eddowes the most important victim. Because she had facial mutilations, implying a certain amount of personal involvement with her. (real or imagined)

Its like a 20 sided die (I'm betraying my inner geek here). Anytime you roll it you are going to come up with something different.

[Errata]

O.K. Errata, just because I like you....he was batshit crazy. He had an infected ingrown toenail, and when he stubbed this toe, the nearest woman had to die. Naturally he was socially stigmatized for this which explains why he never stubbed his toe at a gala in the palace and took a try at the queen. Dave

Pain = Woman.

You might be onto something there.

Social stigma is a funny thing. And there is no telling what people choose to pay attention too. Does it make sense that a man is so ashamed of the stigma his homosexuality might cause that he kills women? Absolutely not. Has it happened? Yes. Is it insane that a man might be so afraid of offending his wife by asking for sex that he turns around and rapes serving girls? Of course. Did it happen? Frequently.

My dad sits behind the wheel of a car and swears at the lady in front of him like she took a sledgehammer to his testicles because she doesn't go the nanosecond the light turns green. I tell him to honk the horn. He says "No! That's rude!"

There's a really interesting article floating around the web about the "killer brain". A researcher has been working on the brains of killers for 20 years. He finds they have similar PET scans and certain recessive genes in common. They've known this for a decade. On a whim he tests his family. He has the same PET scan. He has the same genes. So why is he not a killer? His theory is that it is because he comes from a loving family. He may well be right. A killer's empathy mechanism may be broken, and that may explain why he continues to kill. Alcoholism explains why alcoholics take drinks 2-40. But something explains why they kill the first time, like something else explains why an alcoholic takes that first drink.

[protohistorian]

Well Errata, serials can de-escalate, this is easily observed in serials with long temporal runs. If the killer was environmentally aware to the level of say a modern 10 tear old, he would certainly have received enough feedback to know the tension was growing. He would not have to be particularly self aware, just not completely oblivious to his environment. It helps to divorce one self from the idea of the violence as a linear progression ( which is a statistical paradigm) and substitute event violence as a function of killer psychological state, which it certainly is in reality. When this is done the most violent events become the events of greatest mental instability. This of course assumes the killer is not a board certified surgeon who is cutting up hookers to hide an alleged illegal marriage of a royal retard, which I dismiss because I can not afford enough pot to make it a logical construct. Realistically, the process of autolysis within heart tissue and the colder weather of winter would keep the heart as a recognizable trophy for some months even in a bacterial rich environment, so we could expect a several month break in events if we except that the M5 trophy was functioning as the M2 trophy functioned for him psycho dynamically. There also exists the possibility that Joe Jackass found an outlet that did not prompt massive city wide attention and potential execution. Denis Rader is an example of someone who took a hiatus because of a more socially acceptable outlet. Dave

[curious]

Hello Curious, I think the killer is conflicted between what society has conditioned him to believe is proper behavior, and the relief killing gives him. I think this is particularly acute in the M5 event,and that the facial mutilations are his method of dehumanizing his victim to lessen this conflict. I suspect this conflict is also a chief motivator for excepting the less pleasurable state of a trophy rather than experience this conflict again with another victim. Dave

Hi, Dave,
I don't have the background in psychology to explain this, but somehow I believe MJK's killer scared himself to death when he saw (and recalled) what he had done -- what he was capable of doing.

If he had lucid moments, just realizing you are capable of THAT, would you not be terrified?

Or, it could be argued that someone was "on" to him after that and had realized he was the killer.

Perhaps he was then watched closely and kept from his night-time rambles until he was eventually committed.

[protohistorian]

Hello Curious, I believe your on to something there. I think scared might be too strong of a word, however, without a historically grounded suspect it is a fine conception. There is absolutely no denying that the M5 event was a sensory assault for the killer. There is enough gore, and enough specific anatomical work that all his senses would have received inputs from doing what is described. Even an unclever person would have received a dose of reality hard for most people to fathom. It is a hell of thing to have to internalize that kind of damage wrought on another for the sake of your pleasure. Even a remotely functioning socially grounded value system would certainly post an objection. Dave

[Errata]

Hello Curious, I believe your on to something there. I think scared might be too strong of a word, however, without a historically grounded suspect it is a fine conception. There is absolutely no denying that the M5 event was a sensory assault for the killer. There is enough gore, and enough specific anatomical work that all his senses would have received inputs from doing what is described. Even an unclever person would have received a dose of reality hard for most people to fathom. It is a hell of thing to have to internalize that kind of damage wrought on another for the sake of your pleasure. Even a remotely functioning socially grounded value system would certainly post an objection. Dave

Personally I think people rationalize much worse on a regular basis. MJK's murder was deliberate and thoughtful. It took hours. There was experimentation. He took the time to prop up her head with her own organs. This doesn't seem like frenzy or bloodlust. This is sculpture. It is purposeful. One of the reasons I doubt she was one of JtRs victims is because it was intensely personal. Her sex organs were pulped. Her inner thighs were flensed. Her breasts were removed. Her lips were chopped up. Her face was obliterated, but her eyes untouched. THIS is about sex. The others were not.

[protohistorian]

Errata, I think you are right in so far as M5 is a deviation of sequence norms. I have also had problems reconciling the time it took. The best I can come up with a shift in psycho dynamics in the killer at the M4 event that would explain the departures as a function of a change within a singular psychopathology. I still have strong reservations about M5 belonging in the same sequence as M1,M2 and M3. Dave

[Errata]

Errata, I think you are right in so far as M5 is a deviation of sequence norms. I have also had problems reconciling the time it took. The best I can come up with a shift in psycho dynamics in the killer at the M4 event that would explain the departures as a function of a change within a singular psychopathology. I still have strong reservations about M5 belonging in the same sequence as M1,M2 and M3. Dave

It's ironic. Mary Kelly's case on it's own seems to have a fairly clear motive. Any part of her that touched a man during the course of business is savaged. Her heart was taken, her face destroyed, her eyes untouched. This is deeply personal. Its almost a sort of classic noir motive. "I will punish you for your actions by destroying what you gave to others, but I will leave your eyes so you can see what your sin has brought you too". Caped villain exits left.

Its when you put her with the other four that her murder and disfigurement becomes pretty inexplicable. Because then it's not personal. And if it's not personal, what on earth is the point of all of that? If it isn't personal, then either it is symbolic, or he just wanted to see what he could accomplish in the amount of time given. But if it's symbolic then why the lack of similar injuries on the others? And if it's opportunistic, then it has to be prioritized. And once you have someone prioritizing which mutilations are the most important to him, we're sort of stepping out of the bounds of someone who could be horrified by their own actions.

And it throws off the other four murders. Well, three if one accepts that Stride's murder was interrupted. Eddowes had facial mutilations. On the surface that tracks with Kelly. But her eyes were disfigured. Kelly's were not. Eyes can be significant. The killer didn't have a lot of time with Eddowes. Yet he took the time to disfigure her eyes. The killer had all the time in the world with Kelly, yet her eyes were intact. If there is time to arrange objects on the ground at the victim's feet, there is time to cut up their face. But he didn't touch the faces of Nichols or Chapman. It could be an evolution. It could also be that something about Eddowes specifically warranted the facial cuts. The first four victims were apparently strangled first. Kelly was not. If the victims were strangled so as to not cry out, wouldn't that be doubly important for Kelly? Who had neighbors at home? If the victims were strangled because the killer wanted to strangle them, why not do it with Kelly?

Kelly's killer is a completely different man. Even if it was somehow the same man, he was so different at Kelly's murder that he may as well have been a different killer. I think when examining motive, it might be useful to separate out Kelly, and try to determine at another juncture whether or not she was a victim of Jack the Ripper, and if so, why her murder is so different.

[Scorpio]

there is one aspect of Ripperology that i cannot understand, and that is the attempts to rationalise his destructive impulses. I am sure they belong to a part of Jacks brain that has no rational component, no more than Wolf or a Killer Whale.

[Errata]

there is one aspect of Ripperology that i cannot understand, and that is the attempts to rationalise his destructive impulses. I am sure they belong to a part of Jacks brain that has no rational component, no more than Wolf or a Killer Whale.

Well, there's rational and then there's rational. Is anything about this rational in the "sane and rational" sense? No. of course not. There is no A or B that when added together equals this C to your average human. I cannot even remotely comprehend what would have to happen in my life to make murder and mutilation an option.

Man is the only animal that kills for reasons other than survival. Certain predators play with their food, house cats and killer whales for example. And clearly animals that feel threatened may very well kill and not consume. But no animal kills and mutilates for pleasure. That is a peculiarly human trait.

When I say "and then there's rational" here is what I mean. In a serial killers mind, A+B=C. "A" may simply be "because she's here" and "B" is "because I want to", but it is still rational in that sense. Some killers are very specific. The Unabomber for example had "Mankind is increasing it's dependence on technology, and will not stop" + "Increased dependence on technology will destroy the world and only I recognize it" = a long term mail bomb campaign. A+B does in fact equal C, regardless that both A and B are crap. It doesn't make sense, it doesn't stand up to any logical challenge, but it is rational. And more importantly, it was rational to him.

Jeffrey Dahmer's motive was terribly rational. Barking mad, with no way in hell of ever working, but rational. Event the theory was sound. If you destroy a certain part of a brain, you should in fact be able to produce a living zombie lover. Clearly he hadn't perfected the technique.Wanting to produce living zombie lovers is not rational in any sane sense. But when you have a guy who is ashamed of his sexuality, unable or unwilling to express himself, completely uninterested in humans as fellow souls on this earth, and clearly incapable of empathy then it kinda does make sense. It probably made as much sense to him as any other option, with the bonus that a living zombie lover isn't going to want to be taken out on dates or introduced to his parents. Again, A+B=C. Insane, immoral, inconceivable, but not irrational.

I think that why they say "There is a method to the madness". Because there always is. Even psychotics are predictable to a point.

[protohistorian]

I agree Errata, people do not act without an environmental input coupled with a cognitive evaluation of the perceived appropriate response. Mental illness of the variety that establishes fatal psycho pathologies is not some foreign and unfamiliar operating system, it is the same operating system as everyone else for all intents and purposes save that the the cognitive component has one or more dysfunctional parts. These range of the ability to contextualize to utter disconnect from the established reality. studies on the brains of sociopaths who have died in custody show a very high correlation between severely abhorrent interpersonal skills (like killing strangers ) and a missing neurotransmitter that is believed to produce the sensation of remorse. If this study is correct, just imagine how little time a truly demented set of skills could be established if every action you took was either neutrally or positively reinforced internally. It also explains why the data on sociopaths is all collected post capture. There is an unobserved progression that leads to the behaviors that result in capture in the first place. When we examine personal histories of sociopathic individuals we see commonalities like arson and animal torture. So much so that there is a perceived triad of precursor behaviors that occur in the vast majority of sociopaths before we reach the level of behaviors that get you permanently incarcerated or executed.

[Abby Normal]

Personally I think people rationalize much worse on a regular basis. MJK's murder was deliberate and thoughtful. It took hours. There was experimentation. He took the time to prop up her head with her own organs. This doesn't seem like frenzy or bloodlust. This is sculpture. It is purposeful. One of the reasons I doubt she was one of JtRs victims is because it was intensely personal. Her sex organs were pulped. Her inner thighs were flensed. Her breasts were removed. Her lips were chopped up. Her face was obliterated, but her eyes untouched. THIS is about sex. The others were not.

Hi Errata
Maybe the initial killings-Nichols and chapman(even tabram perhaps), were mainly about revenge/anger/mission motivation and with chapman a new stimulus arises when JtR is sexually aroused with her murder and mutilation. Hence, with Eddowes and Kelly (along with the initial motivation) there is now another added "sexual" motivation as evidenced by the facial muliations in Eddowes and the virtual orgy of mutilation you mentioned with kelly.

[protohistorian]

Abby, if you like puzzles, consider why the M4 trophies did not produce an event lag like the M2 trophies did. Dave