Did he have anatomical knowledge?

[Michael W Richards]

I have provided details obtained from a consultant gynaecologist, a forensic pathologist and an eviscerator you cant get better than that. Who all say that the organs could not be removed in the time given. And all concur that anatomical knowledge was used.

Nick Warren said he wouldn't be able to and now Prosectors says the same what is it going to take to convince some that the killer did not remove the organs.

I suspect the organites will not rest until they find someone who is prepared to say yes it could be done to prop up their theory

Hi Trevor,

Problem is, the part in bold above disagrees with every contemporary medical expert, people who actually examined the bodies, and people who were at the top of their respective fields at the time.

And Chapman and Eddowes were the only 2 where this argument matters at all.

Cheers

[Cogidubnus]

and of course on the battlefield they would be removing uteri and kidneys by the dozen

Of course they would Trevor...and the regimental mascots would be carrying their trophies god knows where...all the way to Goulston Street...

No disrespect to prosector but it is obvious he is not an independent and unbiased contributor. He may well have some medical knowledge but he also has a vested interest in the case so that might cloud his view points which some seem to want to readily accept ?

Oh really...Hey congratulations Prosector on your elevation into the ultimate Cabal!

Honestly Trevor, I've stood up for you under all sorts of pressure, but you just can't resist undoing it can you....I'm honestly very sorry...

All the best

Dave

[Cogidubnus]

Maybe, we can keep the theorizing out of this thread and see if we can 'all' learn something from one who has experience?

I agree with you wholeheartedly Jon (second time this year!)

All the best

Dave

[Errata]

I have provided details obtained from a consultant gynaecologist, a forensic pathologist and an eviscerator you cant get better than that. Who all say that the organs could not be removed in the time given. And all concur that anatomical knowledge was used.

Nick Warren said he wouldn't be able to and now Prosectors says the same what is it going to take to convince some that the killer did not remove the organs.

I suspect the organites will not rest until they find someone who is prepared to say yes it could be done to prop up their theory

My dad is a gynecologist, and he said he could do it in less than three minutes if he wasn't concerned about putting it back together, except that he is 70 and isn't sure he could get up from doing that procedure. My cousin is a medical examiner in New York City, and he says not only could he do it, but your average dog could do it in that amount of time assuming the abdomen was slit open. And I don't know an eviscerator, but I watched a chef extract the heart from a cow in under five minutes in a butchery contest in Brooklyn. And I would think that's a LOT harder to get at then the uterus. Although that was by no means a neat operation, and required bolt cutters of a size I have not seen previously or since. Thank god we had raincoats really.

[Abby Normal]

Dear Abby

My suspect is not someone who has ever been mentioned before. You will not find his name in any archive to do with the affair. Although I know that he was known to the police he was never a suspect. I am still working on my research and will make my own theory known in due course.

Having said that, I believe that Jack knew MJK and had his own reason for wanting her dead (and in the most humiliating way possible). He did not, for obvious reasons, want his name to be connected to her so he planned a series of killings to make it look as if it was the work of a random madman. I believe it was the Tabram killing that gave him the idea.

If I'm right, he wasn't a doctor but he did have anatomical knowledge and a reasonable familiarity with dissecting rooms and mortuaries.

Hope that that suffices for the moment.

Prosector

Hi prosector
Thanks. I guess it will have to suffice. But I will be frankly honest and tell you that my anxiousness has been tempered by your idea that he planned the previous series of murders to make Kelly's murder appear to be someone else. Obviously if that was his intent it failed miserably! IMHO we are dangerously close to conspiracy theories and the like. Also, in the history of serial killers I do not think that there is any motive that comes within a million milles of what you are suggesting. But enough of that I will be interested in seeing what you come up with when you decide to tell, whenever that would be!


I appreciate your expertise on the medical aspect of this and I have always thought the killer must have had some anatomical and/or surgical skill. I have also always said that he probably knew Mary Kelly.

I think you are implying the dear boss letters are authentic and I ask before and I ask again-why do you think he wrote they say I am a dr now?

I also find it somewhat odd that you keep mentioning the dear boss letters but not the other one that most Beleive out of all the letters to be possibly authentic especially since it involves directly something that is right in your wheelhouse. The from hell letter and kidney. What's your take on that? Is it eddowes kidney?

[Prosector]

Hi Abby

As far as other cases where a serial killer murdered several people to disguise his real object see Ronald O'Bryan, the Candyman. A classic case and very similar in my view to JTR. There have been others but that is a good example. I'm not saying it's common or that a rational human being would think of it but my Jack wasn't normal. He had definite psychological flaws.

Your point about 'they say I'm a doctor now' is highly relevant. I'll say more about that in due course.

I don't think that the Lusk letter is from him, mainly because it doesn't seem at first sight to be by the same person that sent the Dear Boss letters although I am perfectly prepared to concede that it might have been. It wouldn't materially alter anything if it was by the same person, it's just that the letters don't have the same smell.

Prosector

[Prosector]

Further to my last post, the difference with O'Bryan of course was that he didn't actually succeed in killing all of his intended victims. It was the fact that he failed with all except his intended victim, his own son, led to his undoing. In Jack's case he succeeded.

Prosector

[Abby Normal]

Hi Abby

As far as other cases where a serial killer murdered several people to disguise his real object see Ronald O'Bryan, the Candyman. A classic case and very similar in my view to JTR. There have been others but that is a good example. I'm not saying it's common or that a rational human being would think of it but my Jack wasn't normal. He had definite psychological flaws.

Your point about 'they say I'm a doctor now' is highly relevant. I'll say more about that in due course.

I don't think that the Lusk letter is from him, mainly because it doesn't seem at first sight to be by the same person that sent the Dear Boss letters although I am perfectly prepared to concede that it might have been. It wouldn't materially alter anything if it was by the same person, it's just that the letters don't have the same smell.

Prosector

Thanks prosector.

Do you think the kidney could possibly be from eddowes? I have always thought dear boss and from hell have a better chance than not for being from the killer:
Dear boss 55 %
From hell 70%


I also think the 1896 dear boss letter you mentioned could possibly also be by the original dear boss writer.

The other dear boss you mentioned, commonly referred to as the Moab and median letter is not IMHO from the same writer as the original dear boss. Totally different tone and all religious. Plus there was something fishy about how the CNA only sent a transcription.

[RivkahChaya]

Hello Rivkah, Prosector. Thanks.

If one were cutting a cadaver for the first time, might it not be that it is natural to cut around the umbilicus insofar as the cutting becomes more difficult there?

Now, wait, when JtR reached the umbilicus (I don't think this is a real Latin word, I think it's an invented medical term, so as long as we're speaking English, "umbilicuses" as a plural; it's hard to say whether an invented word is a second declension or fourth declension noun, etc.) of each victim, did he cut around, or through? and did he just saw and hack, or use a technique?

The doctor pushes the cervix above the pelvic bone so they can feel it. (Yes this hurts).

You need a new doctor. This does not have to hurt.

Caesarian sections were not performed by what Errata describes as standard procedure in 1888 (they were not performed at all to any great extent).

They were performed, it's my understanding, to try to salvage a living baby from a dead mother, so speed was the main concern, I would think, and not the need to get her back together, so there may have been some hacking away involved, at least in some cases.

BTW, does anyone know the success rate of this? I mean, when a mother died peripartum, how often could the baby really be saved?

Oh, and in case anyone cares, Julius Caesar was not born by c-section, as his mother was alive well into his adulthood. The name "Caesar" comes from the Latin word for "hair," because he was apparently born with a full head of it. That explanation dates back to (IIRC) Pliny the Elder. The medical term "caesarian section" is only about 120 years old.

I think that most of you believe that surgeons then had a great deal more skill than was in fact the case. You are looking at it from a 21st century perspective. In 1888 99 out of a hundred surgeons had never so much as made the tiniest incision in a living human's abdomen.

I think you underestimate a lot of us. Few of us know much about medicine in particular, but many of us know a great deal about history.

Such experience as they had of that great uncharted territory came from the dissecting room when they were medical students (1 cadaver if they were lucky) and such post mortem experience as they might have picked up as police surgeons and such like.

Prosector

If that is true, then theorizing a Ripper with medical training, to me, seems less likely than a Ripper who simply was not an inexperienced killer. Most serial killers have killed and dissected animals, and since we don't know who JtR was, we simply don't know whether he had previous human victims, or whether he had done something like grave-robbing.

[Sox]

Further to my last post, the difference with O'Bryan of course was that he didn't actually succeed in killing all of his intended victims.

I'm afraid I'm not seeing this. O'Bryan killed his son with poison and intended that four other children die on the same night in order to cover up the motive, which was insurance fraud.

Also, while it is correct to say that abdominal surgery was rare in 1888, it was by no means unknown, the first operation to remove a kidney from a human being was performed nineteen years before the Ripper murders. Surgeons operate under restraints that did not apply to the Ripper, a modern day operation to remove a kidney takes upwards of three hours for example, but Jack did not have to worry about his subject surviving and living a long and happy life.

The real question to ask those with medical expertise should be 'how fast could you get to the heart/uterus/kidney if you need not worry about your patient surviving?' The only real knowledge the killer needed was the location of the organs he wanted, if indeed he wanted any at all and wasn't just choosing them on the spur of the moment. What he cut through to get to them, and how much damage he caused, is irrelevant to whether he had any 'skill', the man was not performing surgery.

Do you think the killer specifically wanted the organs he removed? If the answer to that question is yes, then I think we have to admit he at least knew where to find them. If the answer is no, then we have to admit he was taking what he grabbed in the dark.

[lynn cates]

deviation

Hello Rivkah. Thanks.

"Now, wait, when JtR reached the umbilicus (I don't think this is a real Latin word, I think it's an invented medical term, so as long as we're speaking English, "umbilicuses" as a plural; it's hard to say whether an invented word is a second declension or fourth declension noun, etc.) of each victim, did he cut around, or through?"

Each victim? Let's stay with Chapman and Eddowes.

With Annie, the entry technique may have made it a moot point.

Regarding Eddowes, I am asking whether the deviation might have occurred AFTER the tougher "materials" were encountered?

Cheers.
LC

[Prosector]

As I keep pointing out, you cannot 'grab in the dark' for the left kidney. It is buried deep behind several other substantial structures including the descending colon, the posterior parietal peritoneum and perinephric fat. It simply does not come to hand if you just stick your hand in the abdomen. You have to know exactly where it is and then systematically remove or divide the other structures before you van get at it.

And when I said abdominal surgery I meant operating within the peritoneal cavity. When Gustav Simon performed the first nephrectomy on a living human I believe, although I'm not certain, he did so using the extraperitoneal or flank incision. That avoids opening the peritoneal cavity and risking introducing sepsis (not a consideration with JTR). And incidentally I have done a good few nephrectomies and they didn't take me anywhere near 3 hours so I don't know where you get your figures from. An hour is more like it (still not as fast as Jack).

As far as O'Bryan is concerned, although he used a different method and had a different motive his reason for attempting a multiple killing was to obscure who his intended victim was I believe that this was also Jack's. We don't know how many other killers have done this and got away with it because if they succeed it doesn't come to light. The fact that killings ceased right after MJK may be indicative of the fact that he got the one he wanted. If he was a blood lust killer he would surely have gone on (and probably been caught in the end as most other true serial killers are).

Prosector

[Prosector]

Lynn

The umbilicus is tough to sew up (the needles bend) but not too tough to slice through fairly easily with a sharp enough knife. Sewing up afterwards presumably wasn't uppermost in his mind so I think it was force of habit or from having watched others doing it in the mortuary or dissecting room.

Prosector

[lynn cates]

oops

Hello Prosector. Thanks.

"The umbilicus is tough to sew up (the needles bend) but not too tough to slice through fairly easily with a sharp enough knife."

My mistake. I thought you had indicated this as a reason for the deviation around it.

Cheers.
LC

[RivkahChaya]

The fact that killings ceased right after MJK may be indicative of the fact that he got the one he wanted.

That's too big a leap, because we know only that the killings in the East End ceased. We don't know that the killer did not go on to kill more people elsewhere, or to change his method so that he continued to kill indoors, and dispose of the bodies in a way so that were not found.

We also don't know that he did not coincidentally die for some reason unrelated to the Ripper killings, or even related, but not in any way that has anything specific to do with Mary Kelly-- he might have nicked himself when he killed Eddowes, and been dying of sepsis even when he killed Kelly.

Then, serial killers can get bored and quit. It does not seem to be typical behavior, but it happened to Gary Ridgway. It's rare that a killer has been caught long after the fact-- usually they are caught as the result of stake-outs, or witness identification because a victim gets away, or other things that make it more likely that they would be caught close to the time of a murder. But now that DNA makes it possible to close cold cases, maybe we will start finding out that more serial killers actually did stop on their own. In fact, in the last decade, a number of serial killer-like murders have been identified decades after the fact, and it turned out the person committed only one murder. So, some people commit what seems to be a lust or thrill murder, but then don't make a habit or hobby of it,