Do post mortem mutilators typically communicate with the police?

[Damaso Marte]

A while back I double-checked the inquest records to see if there was any mention of "sexual connection", and saw that in most of the cases they explicitly say there was no evidence of sex, and never do they say there's any evidence of it.

You're right, if the Ripper did not write any of the letters (and the consensus here is that he didn't), it sounds like a very lonely existence indeed. Perhaps he still enjoyed the fact that people were writing letters about him, and perhaps the escalation of mutilation was at least in part an attempt to rile up the city some more.

[Ausgirl]

What's always confused me about the 'no sexual connection' thing is - weren't these women prostitutes (by and large) - so would there not have been at least -some- evidence of one or more having had sex at some point that evening, prior to JtR's attack?

It's just always seemed a bit iffy, to me, that they could be so sure.

Not, as I said, that think JtR raped his victims .. but still. Odd. Sorry to go bit off-topic.

[Errata]

What's always confused me about the 'no sexual connection' thing is - weren't these women prostitutes (by and large) - so would there not have been at least -some- evidence of one or more having had sex at some point that evening, prior to JtR's attack?

It's just always seemed a bit iffy, to me, that they could be so sure.

Not, as I said, that think JtR raped his victims .. but still. Odd. Sorry to go bit off-topic.

On a living victim, if the sex was consensual or not, the fluids in the vagina break down the semen fairly quickly. Sort of releasing the sperm to do what it needs to do. Today that can be found with swabs and microscopes, but back then it couldn't. The only evidence of sexually activity to be found on a corpse was what had dripped out of the vagina onto the labia and inner thighs. Even when dried it was still evident. Prostitutes clean themselves up between clients. So that evidence would be gone by the next client.

Secondary indicators of intercourse were useless in these murders. Labial and vaginal tearing are indicative of rape, but they are also indicative of unwanted sex. Which prostitutes engage in. They consent, but as they are not turned on or whatever, the act is always hard on the anatomy in question. It's no indication that their killers raped them. The damage could easily have come from a previous client.

Which is not to say the Jack did not have sex with them in unconventional ways. I doubt anyone would be looking for semen inside the abdominal wound for example.

[Wickerman]

Which is not to say the Jack did not have sex with them in unconventional ways. I doubt anyone would be looking for semen inside the abdominal wound for example.

Given that the wounds were certainly examined, are you suggesting a surgeon would not recognize semen if he saw it?

I'm inclined to think that the term 'no evidence of connection' is an indication of the more prudish view of conventional intercourse, that they are not suggesting there was no evidence of semen on the clothing.

A point of caution may be noted here. In many cases the victim was autopsied several hours after the murder. By that time any semen on the clothing would have dried sufficiently that a surgeon may only assume this is trace evidence of her calling in life rather than proof she was intimate with her killer.
So they may have seen such traces but it was only to be expected.

[Errata]

Given that the wounds were certainly examined, are you suggesting a surgeon would not recognize semen if he saw it?

I'm inclined to think that the term 'no evidence of connection' is an indication of the more prudish view of conventional intercourse, that they are not suggesting there was no evidence of semen on the clothing.

A point of caution may be noted here. In many cases the victim was autopsied several hours after the murder. By that time any semen on the clothing would have dried sufficiently that a surgeon may only assume this is trace evidence of her calling in life rather than proof she was intimate with her killer.
So they may have seen such traces but it was only to be expected.

Firstly, I don't think they would recognize it if they saw it. They may have thought it looked like semen, but I don't imagine for a second that they would have thought it actually was. To this day that is the kind of thing that gets missed on autopsies all the time. It simply doesn't occur to the average person that semen would be in there. So even if they found it, they would assume it was something else. Secondly, I don't think semen would have survived in a visually recognizable state in the abdomen. Too many other fluids gels and bits in there.

[Ausgirl]

This is all pretty much along my own lines of thinking, as far as whether rape occurred or not.

My biggest tip toward a 'no rape' scenario is probably the matter of time. Some of those murders occurred in an extremely brief window of time, and not to say ejaculation -couldn't- happen in that time, as it most certainly could.. but IF the murders were in any way sexually motivated I rather think that IF ejaculation then happened, it must have been right quick.. or (to my thinking, more probably) happened back at home while the killer could take his time reliving the thrill of the murder in his head.

Just to kind of bend things back on-topic, I've also been thinking about the posing of the bodies.. I haven't much doubt they were actually posed, and that means the killer -wanted- to send some sort of message. So that's another reason why I think JtR could very well be the sort of mutilation killer who'd taunt police. Posing in itself is a form of communication.

[Scott Nelson]

I doubt anyone would be looking for semen inside the abdominal wound for example.

Oh God! Do you have any idea what you're suggesting?

I must say, I have never thought of this possibility before, and it's absolutely disgusting!! To think that the Ripper wanted to stick his member in an open, bleeding wound, possibly to simulate sex with a ruptured hymen.

But such was not to be with middle-aged prostitutes, so he cut them open, and stuck it in wherever....bleh!!

Forgive me if I've misinterpreted your analogy.

[FrankO]

I do think JtR enjoyed a 'game' of sorts with police, being that the murders were mostly committed within a stone's throw of regularly-walked police beats, in an atmosphere that was pretty far from isolated and may have even had him missing being caught by gnat's whisker - all very high-risk behaviour.

Hi Ausgirl,

If the Ripper lived in the neighbourhood and was poor, he may very well have felt compelled to do what he did close to his home. He may just not have liked to put any effort in killing somewhere more isolated, in places he didn't know and wasn't comfortable with. If so, wherever he struck in the densely populated area he lived in or close to, it was bound to be close to a police beat. In my view he tried to limit the high risk by killing in the nightly hours of lull.

All the best,
Frank

[Wickerman]

Firstly, I don't think they would recognize it if they saw it. They may have thought it looked like semen, but I don't imagine for a second that they would have thought it actually was.

The problem with this idea is that a surgeon or pathologist already knows what he expects to see in a wound, and slimy opaque mucous looking substance is an alien substance.

To this day that is the kind of thing that gets missed on autopsies all the time.

Then if it is missed so often, how are you able to make the case? Surely it must be found in order to substantiate your argument.

It simply doesn't occur to the average person that semen would be in there.

Which is why surgeons/pathologists conduct autopsies, and not your average person

So even if they found it, they would assume it was something else.

Not really, the surgeon/pathologist already knows what he expects to see inside the body.
However, given the time that often elapsed between the body being found and the autopsy being conducted, any trace of semen inside wounds, as you finally suggest, may have become unrecognizable.

Regardless, getting back to the Ripper - in most cases there doesn't appear to have been sufficient time for such intimacy, except perhaps with Kelly, but less likely with the others.
These killings don't come across to me to have been sexually motivated with respect to self gratification at that level.

[Errata]

Oh God! Do you have any idea what you're suggesting?

I must say, I have never thought of this possibility before, and it's absolutely disgusting!! To think that the Ripper wanted to stick his member in an open, bleeding wound, possibly to simulate sex with a ruptured hymen.

But such was not to be with middle-aged prostitutes, so he cut them open, and stuck it in wherever....bleh!!

Forgive me if I've misinterpreted your analogy.

Nope, you've got it alright. And it does happen, and they do it for any number of reasons. And it's not an act confined to serial killers, as several stories of similar behavior came out of the Vietnam war, presumably as a final act of humiliation.

And it is disgusting. Personally I don't think it was the case in the Ripper murders. That's sort of a whole new realm of bloodstains that would be alarming and obvious, even in the dead of night. Some splatters and smears is one thing, the entire crotch of your pants and lower shirt soaked through with blood is another. Bu since we know it does happen, the possibility should be kept in mind. Even if it seems unlikely.

[RivkahChaya]

This is long, but I have replied to several different people on different topics, because I haven't checked the thread in a while. Please don't TL;DR it. If the first reply doesn't interest you, scroll down to the next one.

Either that or they were (or at least one of them) and the ripper was highly atypical, even for a serial killer.

I think you've made good points, and they work as long as we go with the most obvious assumptions about the Ripper, such as these: MJK was a Ripper victim, and the Ripper was a resident of the general area.

If someone who had the possibility of taking the women somewhere private, because he had a house with more rooms than occupants, and could take his time disposing of the body, then he made a deliberate choice to leave pretty shocking corpses on the streets, and that seems more like the act of a terrorist, than either a sadist, or a necrophiliac. However, assuming that when he had the first opportunity to kill indoors, he did much, much more than ever before, because he had time and cover, I think we can also assume that the other bodies were left on the street, because he had nowhere else to take them. He may not have been a dosser, but he probably did not live alone; he either lived with family in a crowded apartment, or he lived in a boarding house, where he did not have a separate entrance (and, probably wasn't on the ground floor). While we have no actual evidence for those assumptions, I still feel comfortable making them.

If anyone ever comes up with any really convincing forensic evidence, or a confession, or something that shows MJK was not a Ripper victims, then I will happily revise that assumption.

Elizabeth Short's killer sent a taunting letter to the police, with some of her belongings.

Were they belongings she had with her the night she was killed, or could they have been obtained some other time?

Ed Kemper took it one step further and actually made drinking buddies of the local PD.

That is not the same as taunting. Some criminals have done this in order to track the investigation.

I don't think it's at all accurate to say that post-mortem mutilators don't communicate with police, when clearly there are those among them who do.

It isn't a physics thing, like you can't stand up and sit down at the same time, and the categories are not exclusive, but I think it's true that there are tendencies. The drummer is rarely the lead singer. It happens, though. Karen Carpenter was a drummer, and also the lead singer of her group for a while-- and their manager identified that as they reason the band hadn't taken off (the audience wants to see the lead singer). After she got out from behind the drums, they started to have #1 songs.

Is there any distinction between... lets say a dismemberer and a post mortem mutilator? [snip] if that's so, then we have to consider that some serial mutilators perform those acts attempting to more handily dispose of the body...or to hide it.

I agree with you, but sometimes it's both. The Glasgow (apologies to people from Scotland, but I don't know another term for it-- "risus magnum fictus"?) smile on Elizabeth Short was a mutilation, but the transsection (I think it was a transsection-- "bisection" means "two equal parts" right?) was probably for transportation.

What's always confused me about the 'no sexual connection' thing is - weren't these women prostitutes (by and large) - so would there not have been at least -some- evidence of one or more having had sex at some point that evening, prior to JtR's attack?

A while back I double-checked the inquest records to see if there was any mention of "sexual connection", and saw that in most of the cases they explicitly say there was no evidence of sex, and never do they say there's any evidence of it.

I think they say "recent sexual connection," which makes me suspect that they looked under microscopes for motile sperm. There's probably an assumption being made about how close together clients might be, or how many a woman might have in one night-- ie, had they found motile sperm, they would have assumed it came from the killer, and not from a client an hour earlier. Honestly, I'm not sure how long sperm will stay motile in a dead (that is, cold) body. It will live for several days in a warm one (and the girls live longer), which is why you can have unprotected sex several days before you ovulate, and still become pregnant.

Today that [seminal activity] can be found with swabs and microscopes, but back then it couldn't. The only evidence of sexually activity to be found on a corpse was what had dripped out of the vagina onto the labia and inner thighs. Even when dried it was still evident. Prostitutes clean themselves up between clients. So that evidence would be gone by the next client.

I don't know exactly what equipment the MEs in London had, but motile semen was observed under a microscope in 1677 (when one presumes Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was disappointed at not seeing the theoretical homunculi), so the technology existed. I'm not sure what degrees of mutilation of each woman made trying to get samples to look at too difficult, though.

Perhaps [JtR] still enjoyed the fact that people were writing letters about him, and perhaps the escalation of mutilation was at least in part an attempt to rile up the city some more.

That's a good point. Most writers we know about, like the Zodiac, would probably be horrified and angry if someone else wrote about their crimes.* So the real JtR maybe was illiterate, or really not much of a self-starter, which is why the crimes were so brief, the women weren't raped, and they just stopped.


*Which come to think of it, might suggest that the real Zodiac was dead, out of the country, or in some kind of situation in prison where his outgoing mail was being read, or his access to news was very limited, because he didn't respond when someone else wrote what the police are pretty sure now were fake "resurfacing" letters in 1974.

[RivkahChaya]

Oh God! Do you have any idea what you're suggesting?...bleh!!

Yeah, we get it. You are a good guy who doesn't take pleasure in women's pain. You make tea and midnight Tylenol runs for your girlfriend when she has her period.

But cripes, what board have you been posting to? Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway used to go back to dump sites, and have sex with the rotting corpses of their victims. Jeffrey Dahmer kept body parts and bones as masturbatory aids. Errata suggested that because it has happened, that we know of, in other cases. Then, of course, there are men who rape children, and that is essentially tearing a hole into them, and while that doesn't happen as often as the child abuse/satan panic people in the late 80s and early 90s would have us think, it does happen, probably daily in a country of 300,000,000.

It's terrible, but this is a board about terrible things.

[Scott Nelson]

Yeah, Riffy. I can't fool you , can I?

[Errata]

I think they say "recent sexual connection," which makes me suspect that they looked under microscopes for motile sperm. There's probably an assumption being made about how close together clients might be, or how many a woman might have in one night-- ie, had they found motile sperm, they would have assumed it came from the killer, and not from a client an hour earlier. Honestly, I'm not sure how long sperm will stay motile in a dead (that is, cold) body. It will live for several days in a warm one (and the girls live longer), which is why you can have unprotected sex several days before you ovulate, and still become pregnant.
I don't know exactly what equipment the MEs in London had, but motile semen was observed under a microscope in 1677 (when one presumes Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was disappointed at not seeing the theoretical homunculi), so the technology existed. I'm not sure what degrees of mutilation of each woman made trying to get samples to look at too difficult, though.

As best I can tell, the typical test for sexual activity was the same up until the 20s, which was swabbing the thighs. And they did that because it was the best way to find unadulterated semen, not semen mixed with other fluids. And it is yet another sparkling example of questions I hate to ask my dad. But he says that the tails of sperm don't last long, especially in adverse conditions like cold, dry, too acidic, too basic, whatever. So the question then becomes whether or not they had the capability of picking out a tailless sperm in a sample. I don't know.

On the other hand, there was also no mention of vaginal or labial tearing. And there should have been. Those are injuries that recur every night of a working prostitutes life. Whether Jack had sex with them or not, those injuries were there, and should have been mentioned. So given that some of these women were known prostitutes, and they clearly weren't murdered by some guy after their spare change, I suppose it's possible that a detailed examination simply wasn't done. They relied solely on a visual inspection.

[RivkahChaya]

Well, maybe this is where the "recent sexual activity" becomes important. Not only were at least a couple of these women indisputably working prostitutes, they were also women who had men in their lives. The word "recent" may have been based on the assumption that they had pretty frequent sex, but not constant sex. There's a witness statement that Polly Nichols claimed to have already had her doss money and spent it, and I think people have assumed she earned it by prostitution, but that is an assumption. Or, maybe with her, the ME really did make a mistake.

Anyway, that's just one of the women. Eddowes was in jail for a considerable time before she was killed, and drinking in a public place, before that, so unless her killer raped her (or she had consensual sex with him before he became violent), it's unlikely she had the opportunity to have sex. Stride's whereabouts are accounted for as well; she would have had to have deliberately slipped off for a really quick quickie when the best evidence suggests she was trying to stay neat for a meeting with someone else, and if Chapman had found a single client, one presumes she would have hastened back to the doss house. Instead, it seems she may have given up and decided to sleep in a doorway (or passed out).

I don't think it was possible to detect anything in regards to Kelly-- I'm not even sure an ME examining her today could detect the presence of semen, and it's not worth discussing "vaginal bruising or tearing."

Anyway, I think it's completely plausible that Chapman, Stride and Eddowes didn't have sex (consensual or otherwise) with anyone within a good stretch of time prior to their deaths, time enough to say there was no evidence of "recent" activity.