Who Chose the Murder Sites?

[barnflatwyngarde]

There might have been a few zealots among the police force who absolutely loathed the idea of a woman selling herself and looked to enforce the law but I would have to imagine that most of the force had priorities other than looking for locations where the prostitutes conducted their business.

As for letting the client choose the site that might have been acceptable to the women prior to Jack making headlines but once he appeared on the scene they might have been a little more reluctant to do so. What rationale would the client have for doing so if the assumption was that the prostitute chose that site for its privacy and to stay out of sight of the police? The client was there for sex not the ambience. Insistence upon another sight might make them suspicious and reluctant to go along with what the client wanted.

c.d.

Sensible points well put.

However, when Peter Sutcliffe was engaged on his murderous spree, there was great frustration among the police with regard to the fact that local prostitutes refused to curtail their activities, even though there was a serial killer out there who targetted primarily prostitutes.

[Harry D]

Chapman was killed in an enclosed back yard, and Kelly in her room, though. It's hard to imagine that either was passing through on her way to somewhere else.

Exactly. Chapman was killed in a known spot for prostitutes and we have witness testimony that Mary Kelly was back on the game. I have my doubts about Stride & Eddowes, but they wouldn't need to be actively soliciting on the night in question to register on the killer's radar.

[curious]

Chapman was killed in an enclosed back yard, and Kelly in her room, though. It's hard to imagine that either was passing through on her way to somewhere else.

I've suspected that possibly Chapman had come to a house she knew to rest in the hallway and had gone to the privy in the back yard and was blitzed on her return.

[c.d.]

Can anyone provide a reason why the killer would choose non-prostitutes to attack as opposed to women who would go off willingly to a dark corner with a man they just met?

c.d.

[curious]

Can anyone provide a reason why the killer would choose non-prostitutes to attack as opposed to women who would go off willingly to a dark corner with a man they just met?

c.d.

I suppose a woman could just be out and in the wrong place at the wrong time and be attacked -- if there was no interaction between killer and victim.

So, it could be the killer was simply on the lookout for women alone.

I don't know that I think this is what happened. I simply see it as a way a non-prostitute could become a victim, which is what you asked.

[Joshua Rogan]

I've suspected that possibly Chapman had come to a house she knew to rest in the hallway and had gone to the privy in the back yard and was blitzed on her return.

It sounds like a reasonable possibility. But if Annie hadn't brought a client into the yard with her, what was the killer doing there?

I happened to see a documentary recently which claimed that Chapman would pick up clients at Spitalfields market. Is that an established fact or just supposition?

[Sherlock Holmes]

It is my belief that the victim chose the site because she wanted an out of the way place to "conduct her business" with the killer. Little did she know that it would become the place of her murder in the end.

Regards
Mr Holmes

[Scott Nelson]

One can't say for certain whether the killer led the victims to the murder site or it was the other way around. Each murder had it's unique set of precursors.

In the case of Annie Chapman, one news story had her being recognized or known by the inhabitants of #29 as a hawker or offering to do causal labor. There is also the story of a mysterious man who slept on the stairs in the months previous to her murder, who could have taken her into the yard on that night.

[caz]

beggars can't be choosers

If the killer targeted women he assumed would be willing to do pretty much anything for the promise of a few pennies, he'd have been looking among the poorest, the weakest, the most drunk or desperate specimens to be found out alone after midnight, whether they were habitual prostitutes, or just beggars hoping for some charity. If he also had a history of using prostitutes, he would have been in a better position than most to recognise - and exploit if it suited him - the difference. He may or may not have behaved like a machine, but his victims didn't. They were individuals with different natures, a different set of familiar and preferred locations and with different ways of managing their priorities. So while their killer might have wished for uniformity and predictability while engaging with his prey, and the ability to dictate certain aspects, in reality I think he would have had to go with the flow and accept that his choices were limited to 'attack' or 'abort', and entirely depended on external circumstances and how each prospective victim reacted to their initial encounter.

While the differences between the murders may indicate different killers, surely some of those differences would have been down to the victims not all acting as one, and certainly not always in the way that would have best suited the killer's needs and desires.

So.... I see Tabram, a prostitute, leading her killer to the landing. I find it unlikely that he would have stumbled over her by chance had she been sleeping there alone when attacked.

With Nichols, she was looking to earn her doss money again along the Whitechapel Road and most likely led her killer to a quieter spot. I'm open to the suggestion that he attacked her en route, if the Buck's Row location was not her intended destination.

As with Tabram, I can't really see Chapman's killer entering the yard alone and finding her there, either asleep or coming out of the privy. I could easily see her leading him through the house and assuring him they will find a quiet corner out the back.

Stride is different, but that doesn't mean her killer had to be. I don't believe she wanted to lead her killer anywhere that night - except perhaps up the garden path - and his options proved more limited as a result of her own priorities and the location she wasn't shifting from.

Eddowes most likely thought she could take some money back to her other half by leading a stranger to the privacy and darkness of Mitre Square and being very nice to him there.

Ditto with Kelly if she met Blotchy in the pub and took him back to her bed, seeing him as her next meal/drink/rent ticket.

Love,

Caz
X

[protohistorian]

I agree wholeheartedly Caz. What this tells us of the killer is that he is not methodical because he is allowing the victims to pick when the punishment for their criminal act in public is orders of magnitude lesser than the punishment for his. If he were truly methodical he would have chosen locations in advance and settled for victims he could get to these low risk places. I think this along with the profusion of ambush sites in the area means we are dealing with a hunter, but not one out for a trophy animal. He picks the low hanging fruit of the victim tree, repeatedly, which means his evolution as a killer is slow because he does not use applied experience to refine his technique. Dave

[John Wheat]

I have to agree Caz and Protohistorian. Serial killers have traditionally picked easy targets often prostitutes as they are among the easiest of targets. There is nothing to suggest Jack didn't do this.

Cheers John

[Robert St Devil]

Hello Caz.

If Jack the Ripper was singular...

Do you think the women had any collective biases? For ex, would Polly, Annie, Eliz, and Catherine frequented women on the street? If you think one of them wouldn,t, then Jack the Ripper wasn,t a woman.

Would they have had a racial bias beyond the Englishman or American? Or were they all willing to be solicited by Jews, dark men, foreign men?

[caz]

Hi Robert,

Apologies, I have only just now seen your questions.

My opinion, for what it's worth, is that the killer of these women was a lone, male, opportunist predator, and the victims would have engaged with anyone who wasn't obviously bad or mad, if there was a fair chance of parting them from a few pennies.

Love,

Caz
X

[Charles Daniels]

Thinking it through, I think the "JtR knew the police beats" notion has the potential to seriously skew a lot of assumptions about the killer.

The person he was with however had a professional interest in knowing the police beats, and if possible, avoiding police beats altogether.

A lot has been made of the International Working Men’s Club in Berner Street being a patently bad location for this that night because it was so busy.

What I don't know is -- would that EVER be a good location?

Was Berner Street reliably busy? Or could it be a case of Stride going there because she'd been there before and on those previous occasions it wasn't quite so busy at that time of night?

Or could it be Stride's experience that the members at the club pretty much kept themselves to themselves and looked the other way if they happened to stumble upon someone with a client?


OR, maybe more interesting, are there any locations nearby Berner Street which would be more sensible?

In this scenario, Stride begins to lead or actually leads the killer somewhere more secluded. BUT she then gets a bad feeling about the killer.

So in that case, she'll try to escape.

Where to go?

Well, that really busy International Working Men’s Club in Berner Street might seem like the ideal location. There will be plenty of people about and she should be safe.

But the killer follows her from the secluded location to the busy location, and, in frustration, kills her then and there anyway.

[Charles Daniels]

An interesting possibility strikes me after reading some of the message the above.

There is this sort of common narrative that the killer finds a prostitute, and they then go off together to some secluded place of likely her choosing but possibly he suggests likely places. This leaves a lot of room for witnesses.
Chiefly other prostitutes who witness the initial deal or the good people of Whitechapel they pass on their way from the crowded location to the secluded one.

But, what if we have a local fellow who knows the most reliable "secluded hot spots".

Maybe he knows that prostitute X will invariably take her clients to secluded alley Y as her first port of call, and sees her there again and again.

So what he does is wait in the shadows, wait until the client is gone, and then approaches the victim?

The major drawback is -- long periods of wait which might turn out totally fruitless. And needing the client to be gone quicker than the prostitute by a good clip.

The benefits is -- no witnesses. The client is unlikely to come back to the scene of the crime.

This does give the killer a very narrow window, and things have to go just right.

But if a known prostitute comes to the same location multiple times in one night, he might have more than one chance for things to line up this way.