Originally posted by avvie
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Of course losing a nose it turns out is a remarkably good threat for good behavior. If getting syphilis means you get a terrible deformity in the middle of your face, it makes you pause. It was quite possibly the best deterrent to risky sexual behavior they have ever come up with. And in places it still is. There was a general sense that this was a common side effect of syphilis. It was never corrected because of it's deterrent effect. If you think about it, how many photos have you seen where a person lost a nose to syphilis? I think there are two men between the advent of photography and the prevalence of antibiotics who were ever photographed with this deformity. There are reports of others, but not a lot of others. And clearly that was enough to sear the idea into our brains for 150 years. But it's very very rare. Rare enough that those it did happen to are preserved in places like the Mutter Museum.
The other time you get nasal deformities is with congenital syphilis. A saddle nose deformity can be severe enough to mimic the loss of the entire nose. Of course there is no risk behavior associated with congenital syphilis other than having the bad luck of being born to syphilitic parents. Which may actually be more relevant than actually contracting syphilis. Someone who whores around and catches syphilis has some ownership in the problem. Yes they may very well blame a prostitute for giving them the disease, but they also know in their hearts that they could have avoided contracted it by not having sex with a prostitute. It's a specific kind of anger that's wrapped around shame. And it can easily be deadly, but it informs victim selection differently.
Someone with congenital syphilis did nothing wrong. His parents did. Had his mother not contracted syphilis, he wouldn't have these problems. And there are major problems associated with congenital syphilis. But not necessarily anything that would preclude him from being a killer. The blame would be different than that of a pissed of customer, who one would think would be content with more obvious kinds of violence than serial killing.
If we imagine that the facial mutilations have something to do with syphilis, and we imagine that it is because the killer actually was facing this problem, then it is far more likely that deformity was caused by congenital syphilis, not gummas from tertiary syphilis. One is textbook, the other is rare. If we are looking at someone with congenital syphilis, then a sexual motivation becomes less likely. Now if the killer was removing the uterus in order to sterilize the victim, and send a message to others to not reproduce, that might be something that a man with a congenital illness might do. There would be a certain sick poetry in that. Nor would the killer necessarily be the one infected. An older sibling who watched an infected sibling have problems, watched other siblings die in the first month of life because their deformities were so severe, that could create a killer as well. It is not out of line to say that Jack was a mission oriented killer, and this may have been his mission. To prevent women like his mother from giving birth to deformed and doomed children.
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And his actions may have changed because of the press. If he had a mission and he thought it was clear what his message was, by reading the news he would have discovered that his message was not getting through. He may have added the facial mutilations to make it more clear. Mission oriented killers are not as locked into a certain pattern as sexual sadists are. MO killers are not recreating a fantasy, they are not engaged in the murder to the same degree, it is more intellectual that emotional, they are more concerned with the result than the method. It means they can change. And they do.
Jack was not a sadist. He had no interest in the death. It wasn't personal. For MO killers who are choosing representatives of a kind of victim, but have no specific victim in mind, that's pretty common, though they are mostly bombers. And that's what you would expect to see in a man punishing a wrong, as opposed to a person. It's why I never thought an avenging clap patient fit. Because that's personal. That's rage. That doesn't translate into relatively painless deaths. If I look at the injuries, it doesn't look like the problem is the person at all. It looks like the uterus and the organs of generation are the problem. That's the target. The woman has to die for him to get to his target, but it's not about her. It's about what she carries. That's not revenge stuff. At all.
Nor is it particularly sexual. Sex comes with guilt and shame and all kinds of negative emotions, especially then. Jack would have to have been a partialist. And partialists kill, I won't lie, but I have never heard of one who managed to dissociate the part from the person to the point that there was no guilt of shame associated with the death. There is no shame. There is no guilt. He did not cover their faces, he did not close their eyes, he did not shield what he was doing from their dead faces (which sounds strange but actually happens a lot). He did not try to cover up what he did. This isn't a sex thing. They didn't matter. If this was revenge, they would matter. They would have been killed painfully, because that's what angry people do. If this had been sexual, then even if the victim didn't matter the judgement of those who found them would have mattered. The sexual sadist still knows that what he wants is wrong. It's why they move bodies. Bundy originally said he did it in order to not get caught, but he eventually confessed that he did it because he could bear the idea of people judging what he did. It's why even to his death he barely confessed to what he did. He knew how bad it was. There are so few sexual sadists who abandon their victims that I can't even think of one off the top of my head, though I'm sure someone else can. But it's not the norm.
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