Was It Personal?

[Glenn Lauritz Andersson]

I've always felt that the Ripper/Whitechapel murderer 'worked his way up' to Kelly, and had the huge benefit of privacy and, I guess, more or less unlimited time.

Oh come on, Graham.
Not that old tale again. This speculation seems to have been become a 'fact' that everyone's repeating like a parrot. No offense intended.

All the best

[Glenn Lauritz Andersson]

If Barnett was suspicious, why didn't the police arrest him and try him in court for murder? Like Tom Sadler.

The same would be true for Kidney, Barnett, Fleming, yes even Hutch if you want to go there. That the detectives would be tickled pink to have an easy-to-identify domestic suspect. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe (as Glenn said) they blew it.

Barnett was indeed 'interrogated' and possibly treated like a suspect (in contrast to the cases of Kidney and Fleming this is rather evident from the files), according tohimself for four hours. However, since we don't have any information about what was said during the interview it is impossible today to establish whether his alibi held up or not.
He could just as well have been released because there was no evidence against him. Let's remember that this was 1888. As I told you on that other thread, Roy, even if the suspect couldn't produce an alibi you would still have the issue of actually proving someone's guilt when you have neither forensic science or a confession.

As for Fleming, there is not one slightest indication of that he ever was tracked down or investigated. Most likely they didn't find him since he had no firm address (he lived at lodging houses) and he possibly had started to use a false name (although we don't know exactlky when he strated calling himself John Evans).

All the best

[Brenda]

If Barnett was suspicious, why didn't the police arrest him and try him in court for murder? Like Tom Sadler.

It is my belief that he simply didn't arouse suspicions when he was questioned. Maybe he played the grieving boyfriend part so well that he was deemed sincere. More than once it has been stated on these boards that he couldn't have done something like that to the woman he loved, which is just plain wrong. Maybe the police bought into that myth though.

Barnett had to have been under incredible stress. His whole life had fallen apart. He'd lost his very good job, his partner, and his home - everything. We're not really sure how he lost his job, but if it had anything to do with Mary, it wouldn't be hard to imagine that he came to blame her for ALL of his problems, as it seems they all happened because of her. People have lost their minds and killed under circumstances much less stressful than what Barnett was facing.

We'll never know whether he killed Mary or the others. But it is NOT AN IMPOSSIBILITY that he did kill the others. If someone is not convinced by that theory, that's fine, but in the end its nothing more than their personal opinion. My previous link before shows that someone killed other people to satiate the need to kill their significant other, so it is not an impossibility that another person would have felt the same way, or acted the same way in the history of the world.

The bottom line for me is, Joe Barnett had to have been either freaking out or very close to freaking out from stress. If he doesn't set off some major alarm bells for you, I urge you to rethink it again.

[Glenn Lauritz Andersson]

Brenda,

I truly doubt that the killer of MJK also killed the others, but apart from that I agree with most of what you say in your last post above. Many good points there.

All the best

[Sam Flynn]

Oh come on, Graham.
Not that old tale again. This speculation seems to have been become a 'fact' that everyone's repeating like a parrot.

I presume, Glenn, you mean that part of Graham's post that referred to the apparent escalation in violence up to and including Kelly - rather than the objective fact that her killer had more privacy and, in Graham's words, "more or less unlimited time" in 13 Miller's Court, than the killer of the previous victims had enjoyed.

[Mitch Rowe]

Brenda,

I truly doubt that the killer of MJK also killed the others, but apart from that I agree with most of what you say in your last post above. Many good points there.

All the best

If Barnett kills Mary he IS the Ripper..It would be virtually impossible(My opinion is that it WAS impossible.)for anyone to copycat such a thing.

I dont know how much more anyone thinks MJKs facial mutilations were to Eddowes but both had their noses cut off! Damn...Thats sick enough for me!

I think you all better be accusing John Kelley. Barnett is non starter on soo many levels!

[Glenn Lauritz Andersson]

No, Sam, I mean all of it!

All the best

[Dan Norder]

On the contrary, the mutilations on Kelly is pretty much a sloppy job and simple butchery and mostly these types of murders are done by people with no prior crimes on their records.

I'm going to have to call your bluff on this one. First of all, most killers in general do have prior criminal records, and certainly the more violent the killing the more likely they had a prior record of criminal violence. Furthermore, the ones who didn't have prior crimes on their records often had just had not gotten caught for them up until that point, it's not that they necessarily didn't have a criminal past. If you want to claim otherwise, please provide a real source to back that up instead of just expecting us to believe it because you said it. You've made similar claims of fact in the past about related topics and never backed any of them up either. The facts don't support your claims.

And that argument are even less reasonable when the geography, dates and exact mutilations are compared to the ongoing string of Ripper murders. Certainly copy cat murders and unrelated domestic murder did happen, but they are extremely rare. It's more than a little reckless to suggest that one that was mere minutes from where Chapman was killed in exactly the same way is at all likely to have been by someone else entirely.

[claire]

Yes, sorry Glenn, but I'd really like to see some cited evidence for your statements. The 'no priors' is very, very rare (at least in UK/America): it is, certainly, possible for a smart individual to escape police notice, but it's against the evidence to claim that those responsible for this extreme sort of homicide have no previous criminal behaviour/record.

Offenders of this type, too, are mercifully rare and, with a bit of (albeit very rough) time series analysis, we might even claim that they would have been rarer still in 1888. The extreme level of violence here argues against a 'simple' domestic by an individual with no previous record (official or otherwise) of violent offending of one or other sort.

Also, I don't really understand your dispute with the statement that the killer had more privacy (and, hence, time) than was available in the other murders. I know MC 13 was hardly an isolated location, but it was assuredly less public than the other murder sites under discussion.

[Glenn Lauritz Andersson]

Oh dear, here we go again. The same tedious nonsense comments.
The problem is, that everytime I've cited examples, I have recieved stupidious and unitelligent remarks like: "Hey, that is not exactly like the Kelly murder!" And so the point is obviously missed and the whole effort has become useless and a waste of time.

Just to make myself clear: we will NEVER find any murder that looks exactly like the murder of MJK, simply because most murders are unique. We may find domestic murders that are worse and those who are less exdessive but none of them will be a carbon copy of the murder in Miller's Court. What should be focused on, is that if a spouse is evil or psychotic enough to mutilate his girlfriend or wife in any extensive way, that should be enough to prove what seemingly 'normal' people is capable of. And examples of this are numerous and - not to forget - many such cases are described in crime manuals, which I know people like Dan Norder likes to read but apparently learns nothing from it, unless he simply is very selective.
Let me cite former investigtaor of the NYPD, Vernon J Geberth in an article from Law and Order Magazine and his crime manual Practical Homicide Investigation (bold emphasis are mine):

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE LUST MURDERS

It is important to note that the motivation in an interpersonal violence oriented dispute may be obscured by what was done to the body of the victim, or how the crime scene was staged or changed. Originally, what appeared to be a rape-murder, the work of a sexual psychopath, or a lust murder is oftentimes based on interpersonal violence.

CASE HISTORY
I remember supervising the investigation of a case which appeared to have been committed by a lust murderer or a psychotic killer. The partially clad body of a 22 year old black female was discovered in her apartment. She had been savagely beaten on the head with a baseball bat and her throat had been slashed. Next to the body was a blood stained drinking glass. I observed a lip print in blood upon the rim of the glass, suggesting that the glass had been used to drink blood. On the coffee table in the living room were a number of kitchen knives, which had been used to slice the victim's body. All the utensils were lined up on the coffee table like an operating room in a hospital. The victim had been eviscerated and a large soda bottle had been thrust into her abdominal cavity. Her intestines could be observed inside of the clear plastic bottle. There were a number of postmortem slicing to her breasts and chest. In addition, the killer had also carved diagonal wounds into both of the victim's legs. This murder was actually committed in a fit of rage during a domestic dispute by the victim's live-in boyfriend."

So with this example - one of many, according to Geberth in his book - one can easily deduce that many of the elements described fits what we usually reckon to be serial killer crimes. The only thing is, they are perpetrated by the victim's spouse and it's a valid illustration of what some individuals with a close relationship to the cictim are capable of doing.

In Sweden we've had several cases of this kind - with more or less excessive mutilation degree and as far as I know, the offenders have no prior crime history, although some of them have had some medical psychological history or some kind of disorder (which would of course fit in with Fleming in connection with the Kelly murder).
Since I am mostly indulging in national crimes on my own home turf, that is of course my basis for any research. How the case statistics for such murders look in the US or Britain I admit I am less familiar with.

As for older examples from criminal history where a spouse has murdered and excessively mutilated his wife or fiancé (and who wasn't serial killers with prior experience of murder), the most notable is of course William Henry Bury (unless someone suggests he was the Ripper). Others are James Greenacre, dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, Patrick Herbert Mahon, Adold Luetgert, John Norman Holmes Thorne and Buck Ruxton.

All the best

[Glenn Lauritz Andersson]

It's more than a little reckless to suggest that one that was mere minutes from where Chapman was killed in exactly the same way is at all likely to have been by someone else entirely.

The only reckless thing here is your continuing attempts to mislead people by delivering your erronous interpretations, like when you say that Kelly was killed 'in exactly the same way' as Chapman. Which is a ludicrous deduction, since Kelly was pretty much butchered and fileted all over the place. Nor the mutilations (except for the throat cut), the missing organ, or the killer's approach and modus operandi show any segnifivant similarity with Nichols', Chapman's and Eddowes' murders at all.

Ad of course, the 'geography' is irrelevant, since it would be natural for such spin-off murders to occur on a location close to the other murders rather than the opposite. Just like the murders of McKenzie and Coles did.

[Jon Guy]

This murder was actually committed in a fit of rage during a domestic dispute by the victim's live-in boyfriend."[/I]

Hi Glenn

Does Gerberth say how the above individual was caught ?

Is it not true to say that most domestic crimes are solved quickly as the first place the police will look is close to home, and as you say, the perpetrator of such crimes is normally not experienced and will not have the mental capacity to deal with their actions, therefore they do a runner or are found having a mental breakdown somewhere.

[Glenn Lauritz Andersson]

Unfortunately he doesn't day, Jon. Nor does he mention any names, but then again. He doesn't even mention the name of the perpetrator in rather well known serial killer cases, but then again I assume that is not his main priority in a crime manual meant for educational purpose. The purpose is to provide examples of behaviour, not to disclose names.

But of course modern perpetrators of this kind are caught rather easily, since they often can be linked to the crime via DNA and other forensic methods, and since their crimes have been committed during a psychotic episode. However, many offenders in domestic mutilation or murder cases can often be quite slick and do their best either blame it on an outside, unknown offender or cover his tracks in other ways.

DNA and other forensic stuff, however, was not available in 1888 (not even finger-print), so it would have taken quite a lot of work to nail the individual to the crime unless he confessed to it himself or was pointed out by several witnesses.

All the best

[Jon Guy]

Nor the mutilations (except for the throat cut), the missing organ, or the killer's approach and modus operandi show any segnifivant similarity with Nichols', Chapman's and Eddowes' murders at all.

Hi Glenn

Both Kelly and Chapman had their abdominal areas removed in 3 "panels". As Sam Flynn points out, both murders had visibility, so when he could see, he removed in panels.

The killer began cutting Eddowes right thigh, buttock and right labia in a similar method to the way Kelly`s thigh, buttock and external organs were removed.

[robhouse]

Jon,

Good points. I have pointed out more than once, that there are many similarities between the wounds inflicted on Kelly and those inflicted on earlier victims, especially Eddowes and Chapman. (for example: http://forum.casebook.org/showthread...3859#post13859)

Also, there is no known difference in the Kelly murder in terms of victim selection, approach, geographic locality, time of day of the murder, etc.

The argument for excluding Kelly is VERY weak, and is mainly derived from the fact that the more extensive mutilation on Kelly tends to obscure the fact that fundamentally, the wounds are similar in character.

Of course, when one makes these very simple (Occam's razor) and clear arguments... ie. the most logical and obvious explanation... one tends to get accused of being "not open minded" and saying "the same old arguments". Of course, those who argue against Kelly's inclusion cannot actually debate in terms of the character of wounds or any other specifics in terms of similarities between the Kelly murder and the Ripper's previous kills.

The fact that she was killed indoors means nothing, if you are going to argue that this is a difference that sugests a different killer. It has nothing to do with victim selection or approach, as the Ripper almost certainly would not have known beforehand whether Kelly had a private room or not. But he certainly would not have rejected her as a potential victim when he found out she did.

Rob