Ada Wilson - Escaped Convict

[Astatine211]

What? What's this? Someone get me drink. A hard one.

I'll do a post on it soon just need to do a write up to make sure all the info I've found is in there. All I'm gonna say is they had a plausible connection to Battersea park and lived within 2 minutes of the Tottenham Court Road and Bedford Square Mystery amongst other things.

[Chava]

Hi all,

The case of Ada Wilson seems to usually be dismissed due to the motive of the perpetrator being money despite their method being similar to JtR's.

This had me thinking that if it was committed by Jack what could his reasoning be for focusing on money rather than just killing Ada. One of the theories of why Jack started killing was due to being an escaped convict. Say they had just arrived in London they would likely have very little money if not none. For example, James Kelly would've just arrived in London just under two months earlier in late January / early February. Being a known criminal he would've felt it was too dangerous to get a job whilst the police were freshly searching for him but could have decided that he needed money for food and shelter after a period of living rough.

I believe Jack was extremely intelligent and had enough restraint to employ his violent methods to benefit himself aside from just murder and mutilation and in Ada's case his attempt came after she refused to give him money upon him threatening her, as I believe in multiple of the other murders Jack had to leave before he was satisfied due to being disturbed.

In conclusion, I personally feel Ada Wilson was the second known 'attack' due to her survival after Annie Millwood, which alongside Martha Tabram made a trio of killings before Jack changed him MO to the canonical 5 and the ones after them. I do have a good theory for this but I don't wanna spam so I'll probably post it in a few weeks. Also if I am already posting too much or my posts aren't substantial enough pls let me know it's just I find JtR very interesting and don't really have anyone to talk to about it but if needs be a can search for more evidence as that's what key to any aspect of this case!

I've long thought that Our Boy attacked Ada Wilson. It's one of the main reasons why I fancy the unknown Mr Blotchy for Kelly's murder. The description of the attacker given by Wilson almost exactly matches Cox's description of the man she saw going into Kelly's room. And he comes up in the Eddowes case as well...

But if he did attack Wilson and then go on to commit the Whitechapel Murders, then I don't see Tabram being part of the series. I sit on the fence about Tabram. But the one thing that doesn't get me over to the HeDunnIt side of that fence is the MO. Wilson was attacked with the classic double slash across the throat. Tabram was frenziedly stabbed. I just don't see the killer altering his method for one attack and then returning to a previous method for the next 5 attacks.

[Michael W Richards]

As rj reminds us in another thread, the so called Canonical Group is comprised of slightly less than 1/2 of the murders that were in the Unsolved files. The question of what were the chances that another man was killing street women during this period of time is answered by that statistic. Yes, there were. Now, which did what is a big question, and how many in total,... but for myself I see multiple killers during this time but only 1 with a penchant for pseudo operating in a public venue, with a interest in the female abdomen.

Thats a smaller group than the C5, and it doesnt end Nov 9th. Within that small group there is still room for doubt, but for me 4 in total might be Jacks tally. More probably 2, but open to the possibilities in the others. Some telltale attributes are present.

[caz]

There is no reason to believe that Jack the Ripper was short on money in general, or that he would commit crimes of the level where getting money was the objective.

Well, if he was short of money, murdering and mutilating the poorest of poor women would not seem to be the most obvious way of getting any. So I don't see money as being a primary objective. I suspect most serial killers would have better, tried and trusted methods, of looking after their basic financial needs, before venturing into their murderous leisure pursuits. But... demanding money with menaces can be a sideline for the nastier criminal type, no matter how poor his victim, and no matter how well heeled he might be himself.

The rich at the 'top' of society don't stop fleecing the poor when they've got enough to live on, so why would a lowly scumbag stop at taking the last pennies from his victim because he wasn't in desperate straits himself?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Another thing that needs to be considered is that its a near certainty that the Ripper was a very religious man, who only committed crimes in accordance to it. Taking money in the process of said crimes would likely be off limits to their religion.

I would humbly suggest that if his plan was to kill and rip up poor women, taking various body parts from them, he was not quite God-fearing enough to worry that taking any coins they had might send him straight to Hell.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

James Kelly was extremely religious so much so that he believed God was protecting him from any harm but was still proven to have slept with many prostitutes. Just because JtR was likely extremely religious doesn't mean he followed the religions ideal philosophy.

Take the many sexual abuse crimes modern day priests have committed, you can't get more devout yet you would think their actions would be as far from God as you could get.

But modern day priests who sexually abuse are not 'devout'. They go into the priesthood to get access to their victims, and do the truly devout and religious a terrible wrong.

[caz]

In Annies case it was suggested by no less than the medical expert who examined her that what was done to Annie was specifically to extract her uterus

Please don't call the doctors in this case "medical experts." They were simply doctors not "experts" as that term is used today in courts.

c.d.

They weren't experts on serial murderers, that's for sure.

[caz]

You tell me to not call a medical proffesional assigned to the investigation and post mortem as an "expert", based on what premise? How they arrived at their conclusions was a direct reflection of what experiences they had and how well they were trained. There were other opinions solicited, such as Bond, who read 4 case files and saw just one woman firsthand. He declared that he saw no skill or knowledge in any of these murders, which contradicts Phillips directly. But who is the more likely to know how best to interpret the wounds...the man who saw them and investigated them, or the man who saw a summary of them?

Its got nothing to do with bestowing god status on an opinion, its a presumption that all these men were the tops in their respective departments and some would have a better idea of what was exactly there, based on first hand inspections.

And of course, they had bags of experience and training on the subject of middle-aged street women who were found dead with injuries similar to those inflicted on Tabram, Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes and Kelly. Happened all the time back then, with all those knife-wielding thugs about.

And yes, I'm learning from your own sarcastic posts, Michael.

[Pcdunn]

Its based on the days the ripper chose to kill his victims and lining them up with Catholic Patron Saints (and their occupations). Richard Patterson went over this here:
https://forum.casebook.org/forum/rip...igious-fanatic

I thought you might be a Francis Thompson fan...

[JeffHamm]

Which raises a point of trivia...
Though it was clear in some cases that the victims pocket content had been scattered, and yet, there was never any money found on the bodies.
If not money, what was he looking for?

And also, presumably he would have had to pay them before they would go to conduct business, where was the money he gave them?

The counter-argument would be that it's possible he attacked when the victim was expecting him to get money from his pocket or coat, as this might have been a point where their guard was down. So it is possible he never handed money to them in the first place. I'm just thinking it seems plausible that he may have had to give them money first, before they made the final journey to the crime scene.

- Jeff

[Darryl Kenyon]

Which raises a point of trivia...
Though it was clear in some cases that the victims pocket content had been scattered, and yet, there was never any money found on the bodies.
If not money, what was he looking for?

Yes, that has occurred to me Wick. I believe he had money on him at the time but took it back. Which is one of the reasons makes me believe the killer was from the poorer social classes
Regards Darryl

[caz]

An old saying is "look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves".

While a poor man would undoubtedly have taken his money back, he had to have some in the first place.

If he did give a victim money, but then took it back, we can't know how much - or how little - he had to offer. It may be that he could afford to offer more than most paying customers, and could therefore attract victims even at the height of the scare. Nothing to lose if he was just going to take it back again anyway.

Rich or poor, there was no sense in leaving his own money on a corpse if there was time to retrieve it.

As we know from the behaviour of some of our beloved politicians [cough cough], one can be filthy rich and still want more, at the expense of the poor.

Love,

Caz
X

[Herlock Sholmes]

An old saying is "look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves".

While a poor man would undoubtedly have taken his money back, he had to have some in the first place.

If he did give a victim money, but then took it back, we can't know how much - or how little - he had to offer. It may be that he could afford to offer more than most paying customers, and could therefore attract victims even at the height of the scare. Nothing to lose if he was just going to take it back again anyway.

Rich or poor, there was no sense in leaving his own money on a corpse if there was time to retrieve it.

As we know from the behaviour of some of our beloved politicians [cough cough], one can be filthy rich and still want more, at the expense of the poor.

Love,

Caz
X

That’s a very cynical attitude Caz

[FrankO]

And also, presumably he would have had to pay them before they would go to conduct business, where was the money he gave them?

Indeed, Jeff.

The counter-argument would be that it's possible he attacked when the victim was expecting him to get money from his pocket or coat, as this might have been a point where their guard was down. So it is possible he never handed money to them in the first place. I'm just thinking it seems plausible that he may have had to give them money first, before they made the final journey to the crime scene.

- Jeff

The counter-argument that's been lingering in my mind for a couple of years is that he attacked his victims as they were putting the money away (and when their guard was down). Nichols, for instance, could have kept her money in her bonnet and it could have ended up next to her and close to her hand instead of on (or close to) her head.

All the best,
Frank