How to sort the Ripper

[Pandora]

You know, I don't know about Sutcliffe. First of all I'm not as familiar with him as I imagine British members are, so I'm not operating with a lot of information. I think Sutcliffe was generally a body abandoner (though he got interrupted a lot early on and I wonder if that changed his inclinations at all), and he did target primarily prostitutes. I don't consider him a mutilator. A lot of stabbing, but that tends to be an emotion/rage thing, where classic purposeful mutilation tends to be fetishistic/sadistic. There is a different emotional quality to stabbing a woman 30 times and opening up her abdomen. The reason I use Soto is not that he stabbed his victims dozens of times, but because he cut off their penises. Which I think most people would say shows something extra in the way of sadism. He had both rage and sadism. Fury and method.

Jack could have moved the bodies (albeit with difficulty or theft), or he could have hidden the bodies near the murder sites. Say, Eddowes dragged to the wall and covered by rubbish from the alley, Chapman could have been levered into the outhouse in the back yard, or even if they had their faces destroyed to prevent identification, that would have been a gesture towards disposing of the bodies without moving them. But these women weren't even rolled over, so there was clearly some cue he had that everything would stop and he would walk away. I suspect it was the uterus, but I don't know. I'm kind of wondering what other killers like him say about it. Still looking.

Well it's a tough one to argue, because Jack pre dates forensic science, which a mid 80's to modern day killer could change his behaviour for, like leaving a body where it lay for fear of dna transfer. These days hiding or destroying the body is part and parcel if a killer has any hope of getting away with it. Jack even pre dates finger prints, which more or less rules out a comparison to crimes from the late 1800's to modern times, as a suspect could change his behaviour in an attempt to destroy fingerprints (or blood type) left behind.

In Jacks time, if you didn't have compelling circumstantial evidence, especially witness identifications, you pretty much had to be caught red handed. He could have left blood, semen, hair follicles, fingerprints and more behind, (and likely did leave some sort of dna behind) but there would have been zero ability to connect it to any one person. Hell, he could have left the knife behind, and unless it was engraved with his initials, the police still wouldn't be able to to link it to anyone.

So in that respect, he can only be compared accurately to serial killers of his era, or earlier.

Sutcliffe is the closest in my opinion, of the modern day killers. He did "mutilate" & stab the stomach, genitals & back sides of some of his victims. And he disemboweled at least two victims. He didn't take organs away with him though, so in that respect, yes, Soto follows that MO.

This conversation sort of reminds me of Pierre's post, about JtR being an extremely rare serial killer. Seems he was right.

[Errata]

Hi Errata,

What about Sutcliffe? He has several things in common with Jack. They both targeted prostitutes, they both killed or knocked the victim out first (Jack by strangling, Sutcliffe usually by bludgeoning), they both mutilated the corpse postmortem with a knife, and they both left the bodies where they were murdered, or at least Sutcliffe did until such time as he realised he could possibly be traced back to the murder sites. Not that Jack could really have moved the bodies, even if he'd wanted to, short of carrying them.

You know, I don't know about Sutcliffe. First of all I'm not as familiar with him as I imagine British members are, so I'm not operating with a lot of information. I think Sutcliffe was generally a body abandoner (though he got interrupted a lot early on and I wonder if that changed his inclinations at all), and he did target primarily prostitutes. I don't consider him a mutilator. A lot of stabbing, but that tends to be an emotion/rage thing, where classic purposeful mutilation tends to be fetishistic/sadistic. There is a different emotional quality to stabbing a woman 30 times and opening up her abdomen. The reason I use Soto is not that he stabbed his victims dozens of times, but because he cut off their penises. Which I think most people would say shows something extra in the way of sadism. He had both rage and sadism. Fury and method.

Jack could have moved the bodies (albeit with difficulty or theft), or he could have hidden the bodies near the murder sites. Say, Eddowes dragged to the wall and covered by rubbish from the alley, Chapman could have been levered into the outhouse in the back yard, or even if they had their faces destroyed to prevent identification, that would have been a gesture towards disposing of the bodies without moving them. But these women weren't even rolled over, so there was clearly some cue he had that everything would stop and he would walk away. I suspect it was the uterus, but I don't know. I'm kind of wondering what other killers like him say about it. Still looking.

[Pandora]

So I got to thinking that when we sort serial killers, we are comparing them to each other. But the usual suspects don't really compare with Jack. Different styles, different treatment of the corpse, different timing. So what do we get if we say that Jack was a body abandoner? Who does he compare to.

Hi Errata,

What about Sutcliffe? He has several things in common with Jack. They both targeted prostitutes, they both killed or knocked the victim out first (Jack by strangling, Sutcliffe usually by bludgeoning), they both mutilated the corpse postmortem with a knife, and they both left the bodies where they were murdered, or at least Sutcliffe did until such time as he realised he could possibly be traced back to the murder sites. Not that Jack could really have moved the bodies, even if he'd wanted to, short of carrying them.

[Errata]

I'm also going to anticipate a question here. If you say to me

"Gee, what is a killer who breaks into his victim's house, murders him/her, and then leaves. What category is that?"

I don't have any idea. And this is pretty common, so that's bad. But I really don't know. Sometimes a killer cleans up, erases all signs of their presence before leaving, and that feels like a body dump. Sometimes they don't, and as best I can tell they just walk out. That might be abandonment, on the other hand it might be a dump like trash. And sometimes a killer stays with the body for a long period of time after death. That's kind of like hoarding? I figure anything with necrophilia is probably hoarding because there is a relationship with the corpse, even if the killer doesn't take anything.

I'm sure there's an answer, I'm sure the person whose theory this is came up with one, has a good reason for it. I just don't know what it is. So no killer I put forward here is going to have killed in the victim's home. I don't know how to sort it, and getting it wrong would kind of blow the point. So I'm assuming it's body dumping for now. That feels like the safe thing to do?

[Errata]

If one uses the old term of multiple killer,and understands that a single kill might have been,except for being captured,a first in a contemplated series,it could broaden the list.

Well, I'm sorting though multiple killers, but admittedly I am looking for serials within that subset. The psychology of drug kingpins, mobsters, and even angels of death is just too different I think to make a comparison, and the same for spree killers. There's a couple of reasons I'm not looking at everything.
A: no one has that kind of time. I mean if you have a pet case you want to compare, by all means, but I still haven't even made it out of California yet, and most of these files get passed over by looking at the number of victims. So there's that.
B: I think comparing a killer of three to a killer of 4-8 probably gets you a good amount of behaviors to work with, but a single doesn't. Not that he might not have been Jack like, just that thankfully he didn't perform enough to develop habits, which is kinda what I'm looking for. I think serially killers become more who they are the more they kill, So the more bodies a person has racked up, the more I can see who they are. Because the point is to find someone to compare to Jack to figure out who he is.
C: The first kill is rarely the ideal kill, so someone who gets caught after one murder didn't even have time to for the habits more successful killers develop. And it's value as to the killer's psychology is huge, but different to what I'm looking for. So a single makes a bad comparison there as well.

It's not that there aren't thousands of frustrated serial killers in jails or dead. There very likely are. But if I want to know Jack's motive, his planning process, his cogency, those guys aren't helpful. If I want to know what turned him into a killer, they might be.

Still looking.

[harry]

If one uses the old term of multiple killer,and understands that a single kill might have been,except for being captured,a first in a contemplated series,it could broaden the list.

[Errata]

We don't know how much of this was a matter of personal circumstance. For all we know the Ripper might have been a body hoarder but if he didn't have access to his own lodgings, and was a transient living in doss houses, it wouldn't have been physically possible for him to keep the bodies for necrophiliac purposes or whatever. That's why he had to make do with taking organs with him as trophies to give him some memento of his crime and the victim.

Well, one of the things about this behavioral model is that it isn't just about choice. In a lot of ways it assumes that body abandoners are motivated, at least in part, by their utter inability to do anything else with the body. So you get homeless killers, killers with some kind of disability, some psychotic breaks all in the same category with mission oriented killers and hunters. But whether they can't or they won't, the body abandoner has no plans for the corpse. And plans for the corpse, dumping or keeping, requires a lot of prep work, requires a lot of mental effort, and can completely alter how a killer chooses to kill. What changes when you know you are going to dump a body? What changes when you know you are going to eat parts of it? It's this one aspect of the crime that can change everything for a killer. So killers who make the same decision, whatever their reason, are likely to have other decisions in common. Because they likely have the same constraints or freedoms.

And in fact we may find that different kinds of victims appeal more to certain kinds of killers because the situation suits their corpse disposal needs. Prostitutes are universally targeted, but students are a favorite of body dumpers so far, someone with a personal connection is favored by body hoarders, especially in parricide. Rapists are almost always body dumpers. Maybe it's a distancing thing, maybe because they view their victims as trash, I don't know. But the two go together. Just like fetishists and body hoarding go together. You find a head in a killers house, you will find other body parts. Maybe other heads. They go together. There are kinds of murders that show up a lot in these categories. So if we can determine what kind Jack is, by choice or by luck, we can have a better sense of what kind of killer he was. Right now non psychotic mission oriented killer is in the lead. A hunter. Not a frustrated rapist, not a fetish obsessed perv. Which is something. I don't know if it will hold through Florida (sigh), but thats in the lead with New York and some of California.

[Harry D]

We don't know how much of this was a matter of personal circumstance. For all we know the Ripper might have been a body hoarder but if he didn't have access to his own lodgings, and was a transient living in doss houses, it wouldn't have been physically possible for him to keep the bodies for necrophiliac purposes or whatever. That's why he had to make do with taking organs with him as trophies to give him some memento of his crime and the victim.

[Errata]

Hi, Errata,

Interesting project.

Wasn't Jack the Ripper seen at the time as something new and original, though?
Assuming all victims were murdered by a single killer, who didn't attempt to hide the bodies or the violence done to them?

The notion of a single man preying on women and slicing them apart on the streets seems to have captured the imagination of the public, both men and women. Whether they wrote hoax letters to the police and papers, played practical jokes on women by ambushing them and claiming to be "Jack the Ripper!", or even killed a significant other under the influence of the articles about the Whitechapel murders, the general public reacted as they had not in the past.

I think a lot of that has more to do with the press and the government of the age than anything else. I do not believe for a second that Jack was the first guy to do this. And I'm not even sure he was the first killer that authorities linked to multiple bodies. I think he is one of the first killers that the press and public had the opportunity to have a relationship with. I think previously such murders were hidden from the general population as much as authorities could manage. This time that didn't happen. The press was as involved as the cops were. The general populace was afraid, not just the friends of victims or the unlucky people who had found the bodies. I think it was the first public case. Weighed in the public eye, investigated in the public eye, judged in the public eye. Which makes the case remarkable, but while rare, I don't think what the Ripper did was either groundbreaking or previously unseen. I think it's more a triumph of the press than of the killer.

That said, finding someone to tick off all the boxes is a chore. And I don't know how much variation I should allow for due to individuality, and I don't know what characteristics to make less important in order to widen the field in an appropriate way. There are calculations that would let me do that, but I certainly don't have access to them in my math free brain. So I'm staying strict, while pulling out some "also ran" candidates if I find someone who is pretty close.

Oddly enough the best fits are spree killers. Except of course they lack one of the major qualifications, which is that it has to be a serial killer. If I could figure out how a spree killer can get stretched out into a serial killer, I might really have something. But I can't.

[Pcdunn]

Hi, Errata,

Interesting project.

Wasn't Jack the Ripper seen at the time as something new and original, though?
Assuming all victims were murdered by a single killer, who didn't attempt to hide the bodies or the violence done to them?

The notion of a single man preying on women and slicing them apart on the streets seems to have captured the imagination of the public, both men and women. Whether they wrote hoax letters to the police and papers, played practical jokes on women by ambushing them and claiming to be "Jack the Ripper!", or even killed a significant other under the influence of the articles about the Whitechapel murders, the general public reacted as they had not in the past.

[GUT]

Certainly food for thought.

[Errata]

The Preface:

I have been espousing of late the idea that it is more informative to sort serial killers by the way they treat the body than other methods used. It's not my theory, I cannot for the life of me remember whose theory it is, but a very smart person whose name escapes me. When I find it again, I will correctly attribute it.

So the way it boils down is this: There are body hoarders, body dumpers, and body abandoners.

Body hoarder have a relationship with the corpse, to the point that it is almost as, if not far more important than the actual murder itself. Dahmer, Gein, Kemper, all body hoarders.

Body dumpers are just that. They get rid of the body, hiding it (sometimes poorly) either to not get caught or to disassociate themselves from the corpse, or even the crime itself. Bundy, Suff, Ridgeway, all body dumpers.

Body abandoners have no relationship with the body whatsoever. Once he murder is over the corpse has no value, and they simply walk away. Son of Sam is the perfect example,

End of Preface

So how do we sort Jack? It's not entirely clear whether he walked away from the bodies, or whether his intent was to display them in a way (which would put him in the body hoarder category). One of the benefits of sorting serial killers this way is that other behavioral traits tend to line up. Rapists are almost always body dumpers. Mission oriented killers are almost always body abandoners. Body hoarders tend to be at least a little fetish-y, which is not something I necessarily see in Jack, but we'll put the proverbial pin n that. But mission oriented serial killers walk away. It would make sense for Jack to be a body abandoner, which would make him more likely to be a mission oriented killer.

So I got to thinking that when we sort serial killers, we are comparing them to each other. But the usual suspects don't really compare with Jack. Different styles, different treatment of the corpse, different timing. So what do we get if we say that Jack was a body abandoner? Who does he compare to.

So I've been sorting through multiple murderers, looking for body abandoners. My first search was way to broad, so narrowed it down to New York, Florida, and California. And if you fear being serially killed, don't move to Florida. But it was still too much so I just went with New York, mostly because that information was already on my hard drive.

Finding a body abandoner is not easy. I'll just say that. Finding one who is also a mutilator is even harder, and finding a body abandoning mutilator who did not turn himself in is frankly not recommended. Out of hundreds of killers, I found one guy.

We turn in our hymnals now to Murderpedia because I got lazy.
Erno Soto (also called Charlie Chopoff) was a man who became obsessed with the biracial boy his wife conceived while they were separated. And apparently he became incredibly fixated on how this child ruined his life. Every couple of months, Soto would stalk a black child, take them or allow himself to be taken somewhere private, stab the child dozens of times, cut the penis off and walk away with it.

I give you our Jack Analog. What we see in Soto we can expect in Jack. In doing so I am challenging one of my own fairly strong assertions that Jack was sane. Because Soto was not. He was in and out of hospitals, mostly through his own wishes. But Soto suffered from a dangerous obsession, one I am not at all convinced that Victorian medicine was equipped to recognize. Had Soto told his story to any Victorian doctor, his rage would be seen as reasonable. Even expected. And psychiatry had a hard time recognizing the problem with any obsession over a person in someone's life. It' why we didn't get anti stalking laws until almost the 90s. So I'm not sure Soto would be seen as ill.

There was another man, Vincent Johnson, who also fit a lot of my criteria (though he was not a mutilator. He was the Willamsburg Strangler. He targeted prostitutes every couple of months, was a mission oriented serial killer, similar timeline, body abandoner. I think he's also worth a look, despite not being a mutilator.

Anyway, I leave this here for perusal and comment. I'm going to finish looking through California and god help me Florida. But I think the reason we have a problem coming up with a comparison for Jack is that the most important aspects of his crimes are relatively rare. And certainly don't appear in the famous serial killers we know to compare him to. By looking for a different aspect of his crime, I think we have a better chance at finding guys like him. So we can maybe understand him better.