What's your profile for Jack?

[Tom_Wescott]

One of two things happened on the night of the double event...either a serial killer shifted his MO, possibly dramatically so, or there were multiple knife killers on the prowl in the same area at roughly the same time, operating in a broadly comparable fashion.

What dramatic MO shift? The previous two victims were both also killed by a cut throat. If there was a dramatic shift it occurred between the murders of Tabram and Nichols.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Damaso Marte]

Yes good comment - this is basically sums up the driving force behind most of the differences of opinions and lively debate i see on these threads. Each of us have our own threshold, depending on life experience, motivations, knowledge of serial killers and so forth. But I dont think Stride as a ripper victim is much in the way of conjecture

Now Farmer being a ripper victim is very much conjecture. I am personally very interested in this attack given the circumstances and amount of witness testimonies, did you know this was the only ripper related event where a distingishing feature was seen on the attacker? Serial killers can get slack towards the end. Also Mylett is very interesting for me.

Oh well I guess only one man ever knew for sure.

A lot of what Ripperology boils down to is considering which of two inelegant possibilities strikes you as more plausible. I agree, that based on our background, our biases, etc., we disagree on plausibility.

One of two things happened on the night of the double event...either a serial killer shifted his MO, possibly dramatically so, or there were multiple knife killers on the prowl in the same area at roughly the same time, operating in a broadly comparable fashion. One of two things happened on the night that Chapman was killed...either witnesses made errors about what time it was, or witnesses didn't actually witness the crime. Etc. None of these things are pretty, but one of them's gotta be true.

Even if, one day, statistical social science based on thorough examination and coding of murders tell us, e.g., that it's an x% chance that it was the former and y% chance it was the latter, people can still argue "well, if it happens y% of the time, why couldn't this have been part of that y%"

[Boggles]

I find Mylett interesting too. Care to share about your interest?

Its suspect bias driven interest im afraid for the most part but aside from this I find the witness descriptions of the two men seen with Rose earlier in the evening and shortly before her death interesting and also a little concerning. A shortish guy engaging with the woman and a tall guy walking around in the background - shades of Stride. Also a hint of Tabram, only this time not soldiers but sailors? - curious i think, what do you think?

[Tom_Wescott]

I can state that so far Ive been able to rule out that Liz Strides killers motivations were to mutilate her after cutting her throat...why?...because there is no evidence that supports that idea.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You only know the 'what' and not the 'why'. Having said that, I agree that it's by no means a foregone conclusion that the Ripper ever planned to mutilate Stride. I believe he went out that evening fully intending to kill two women. I believe he intended to kill in Met and City divisions and he had every intention of writing a chalk message (though I suspect it was intended to be over the body of his second victim and not over her torn apron blocks away). All of this was foretold weeks before the double event even happened.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Tom_Wescott]

Hi, Tom, Checked out your Facebook page for the book. It sounds very interesting.

If the murders deal with the "same addresses" on George Street . . . I was going to say "same landlords, then" but realize it's the same of so many possibilities. . .

Hurry and get that book out . . .!

curious

Hi Curious. I've always said you're wise beyond your years. The landlords play a bit part in my book. I have a section called The Lords of Spitalfields about them. For a tutorial on what the police were up against when taking on the lodging houses I suggest everyone read Rob Clack's excellent Death in the Lodging House regarding the murder of Mary Ann Austin. It's more or less what I believe happened in the Emma Smith case.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Michael W Richards]

Just a reminder that providing proof that one of the Canonicals prostituted themselves is indeed valuable information, many of the remarks about them seem rather judgmental without actual incident proof of that activity...like in Kates case,... however, it solves none of the related questions about what some were doing when they meet their killer(s).

How the killer of Polly and Annie met them is fairly certain,.. but none of the other cases have corroboration on that same point from the soon to be victims themselves. In the case of Liz Stride, as mentioned previously, we have a woman who was killed with one cut on a night when domestic violence took one womans life, by knife....(the earlier point Tom on that murder was obviously the lack of mutilations, although I could see an argument for such considering the severity of the attempt at decapitation....but there was more than 1 stab), and an apparent madmans uncontrolled behaviours caused another death.

3 murders of women, 2 in the East End, only 1 with a known motive.

When you have not been able to discern a motive it is unwise to then just assume the motive must have been madness on the part of the killer, because in actuality a very small number of murders happen under those circumstances,... and a very small number of the many, many, killers over the years, killed solely because they felt a need to. Money, jealousy, power, rage, honor, political or religious disparity, protection of family or property...any number of core reasons might be present that can be understood by anyone as potential catalysts for violence.

No-one accused Mr Brown of being The Phantom Menace because he killed his wife that night with a knife, so why should Liz Strides killer be categorized that way without any physical evidence to support it, and a still unknown ulterior motive?

Search for possible motives...then rule them out. That seems to be far more practical to me. I can state that so far Ive been able to rule out that Liz Strides killers motivations were to mutilate her after cutting her throat...why?...because there is no evidence that supports that idea.

Cheers

[curious]

Also Mylett is very interesting for me.

Hi, Boggles,

I find Mylett interesting too. Care to share about your interest?

thx,

curious

[curious]

the same addresses on George Street.
Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

Hi, Tom, Checked out your Facebook page for the book. It sounds very interesting.

If the murders deal with the "same addresses" on George Street . . . I was going to say "same landlords, then" but realize it's the same of so many possibilities. . .

Hurry and get that book out . . .!

curious

[Tom_Wescott]

And I think that if there is a general feeling amoung many contributors of doubt wrt Stride and the GSG they may never be

Hi Boggles. Typing with your foot while eating your lunch? I wonder if your point might have been lost.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Boggles]

I don't think these connections have been properly appreciated.

And I think that if there is a general feeling amoung many contributors of doubt wrt Stride and the GSG they may never be

[Tom_Wescott]

Yes good comment - this is basically sums up the driving force behind most of the differences of opinions and lively debate i see on these threads. Each of us have our own threshold, depending on life experience, motivations, knowledge of serial killers and so forth. But I dont think Stride as a ripper victim is much in the way of conjecture

Now Farmer being a ripper victim is very much conjecture. I am personally very interested in this attack given the circumstances and amount of witness testimonies, did you know this was the only ripper related event where a distingishing feature was seen on the attacker? Serial killers can get slack towards the end. Also Mylett is very interesting for me.

Oh well I guess only one man ever knew for sure.

Hi Boggles. You're not the only one interested in these seemingly sidebar cases. They're all connected to the same addresses on George Street. I don't think these connections have been properly appreciated. That's not to say all these attacks and murders were one may, but there may be a relation there.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Tom_Wescott]

Hi Damaso. That may be your approach. It's certainly the approach of some others. But it's not everybody's approach. There will always be things we don't know but there are also many things we do know. Or at least that some of us know and some others prefer not to know... for reasons I'll probably never understand.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

Damaso's reply...

I'm not sure you know anything that the rest of us actually don't, at least not in the positive sense of the word. You may have a higher threshold for how much evidence needs to be behind a conjecture before you entertain that conjecture, but you don't have any special knowledge unless you're sitting on a lost or untranslated file.

Hi Damaso. You misunderstood my meaning. I wasn't saying I know more than everyone else I was saying that for some reason certain people prefer NOT to know things, if that makes sense. For instance, there was this long debate on here about Stride being a prostitute, with certain parties saying there was no evidence for it. So I posted actual evidence that she was. Everyone shut up. But the debate will begin anew at some point as though that evidence doesn't exist. So it's a case of certain folks KNOWING something...just like you and I know it...but pretending they don't. That's what I have a hard time understanding.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Boggles]

You may have a higher threshold for how much evidence needs to be behind a conjecture before you entertain that conjecture

Yes good comment - this is basically sums up the driving force behind most of the differences of opinions and lively debate i see on these threads. Each of us have our own threshold, depending on life experience, motivations, knowledge of serial killers and so forth. But I dont think Stride as a ripper victim is much in the way of conjecture

Now Farmer being a ripper victim is very much conjecture. I am personally very interested in this attack given the circumstances and amount of witness testimonies, did you know this was the only ripper related event where a distingishing feature was seen on the attacker? Serial killers can get slack towards the end. Also Mylett is very interesting for me.

Oh well I guess only one man ever knew for sure.

[Errata]

G'Day Errata

That's where we disagree, some alcoholics don't have control over whether they drink or not. And I believe from the psychiatry and psychology that I've studied that some killers fall into the same category.

Unfortunate as it is there are times when humans do not have control over what they do.

Of course they have control. They have to buy it, pour it and drink it. All conscious actions. They don't have control over their heartbeat or blinking, but a bottle of vodka they do have control over. And in fact because it requires positive action, not drinking is easier than drinking. It is the literal path of least resistance. To say that they don't have control is to say that they are doomed to end up in a gutter. That their biology has selected them to die, so we might as well just get it over with and spare them the pain of a failed liver. Of course they have control. Some merely choose not to exercise it.

And the only serial killers who even remotely resemble what you describe are the Schizophrenic serial killers, of which I think there are three. Mullin was so delusional he thought he was saving the world through murder. Which still makes it a conscious choice, but an understandable one if you look at it from his point of view. Serial killers may feel very very bad if they don't kill, they may even have all the psychological symptoms of withdrawal. But they all have a choice. They all have control. They exercise that control every minute of every day, otherwise they would be hip deep in the corpses of people that they know and see on a regular basis. There comes a time when they choose not to exercise that control. But nothing about the act of murder is unconscious or involuntary. They choose to act. They may do it because they are in desperate pain or horribly agitated, but they do choose. Every time. There is nothing ever found in any serial killer brain that would even remotely suggest that their behavior was any less voluntary than say, opening a soda can. Poor judgement is not the same as having no control.

[Elenahoyos66]

It is my unprofessional belief that the serial killer, formally known as 'Jack the Ripper', was a complusive and repetitive Lust murderer.

Serial killers generally form fantasies in which they enact out on (I mean, duh, how astute of me!), some motivations (I.E the stimuli in which they enact out on) could be Rage or Lust etc. For example, the man who would abduct women, strip them naked and dump them in the woods only to hunt after them like wild prey, was a Lust murderer because he recieved a certain sexual gratification off of it.

Or, we could also use the woman who would strangle infants in her care. Or the other woman who would posion her elderly dependent patients; she would hold them in her arms and watch them die. Her derived pleasure was not the act, the idea of posioning them to death, but more or less the fact that they would be dying - - she recieved sexual gratification from holding a dying person in her arms. It gave her a thrill.

As for with 'Jack', his modis operandi may be different (mutilation), but he is still a Lust murderer. The concept is to not necessarily even kill his victims, he possibly doesn't have an extreme hatred or anger towards them (possibly) - - what he is doing is studying the insides of women; he's fantasizing about their insides - - the genitalia and abdominal mutilations - - he is studying, he is curious, and each mutilation or act holds either some symbolic significance or relief which gives him sexual gratification.

It isn't the death that excites him, it isn't the idea of killing a frail woman, the fantasy in which he is enacting out on is not to cause fear or pain or torture, but to study.

So, in that way, we're dealing with a very twisted individual (once again, duh!)

One need only to look at Kelly; he defaced her, not so much to render her humanless, but because the facial mutilations in and of themself held some allegorical importance to him. Notice that the whole pelvic area is mutilated to a pulp and the hand is placed in the stomach.

I know this was mentioned somewhere before, but I agree that with that he is basically saying, "Thank you for letting me do this to you."