Did Jack had some sorta horrible experience in his life?

[caz]

Hi All,

Look, if a grown man can work up this much resentment against a total stranger, or can just feel somehow entitled to exercise his power over life and death, what kind of Godawful behaviour would we expect him to have tried on as a kid?

People talk as if the poor man must have been saddled with a terrible ma or pa when he was but a sweet and innocent lad, to turn out that rotten. But isn't it just a tad more likely to be the other way round, and the mother of this rotten to the core adult had found herself saddled with an exceptionally wilful, selfish and difficult child? One who resented and resisted all attempts to get him to do, or stop doing, anything against his will? One who blamed his parents and teachers for always picking on him and treating him unfairly, while leaving his siblings and classmates alone, when the reality was that it was his unacceptable behaviour and refusal to co-operate with anyone that got him more negative attention than his peers?

Easy to see how the boy, once grown, could have an awful lot of lessons to teach those now weaker than himself, to make up for all the years when mother and co were struggling to impose any boundaries at all on his behaviour.

Love,

Caz
X

[smezenen]

If you go along with Jack being a local boy then his growing up was rough enough to make him a bit off anyhow.
I look at my kids with their playstations, MP-3 players, DVDs, color tv's and I think man they have it easy. My son got an Xbox for his 6th birthday, what did i get for mine, that ball on a rubber band attached to a paddle, you played with it about 5 times and the rubber band broke, the ball flew across the room and broke something and then you got spanked with the paddle. but look back to the 1850's or 60' when Jack would have been growing up and see what his conditions where. I think i might have turned out the same had i grown up then and there.

Did Jack had some sorta horrible experience in his life? Yep he was born.

[Mascara & Paranoia]

But practically every boy and girl in those days would've been brought up in the same environment. I don't see Jack being a product of that unless he was abused somehow, and even then loads of abuse victims turn out relatively normal. Whether or not he experienced some nasty stuff during his lifetime that may have influenced his behaviour later in life, it's not the only contributing factor. Whoever Jack was wasn't wired right regardless.

[perrymason]

There may be episodes in his life where his environment and/or experiences contributed to the personality he developed...like a youth on a farm who liked to watch animals be butchered, or a boy who had negative experiences with a female or females in his life, or someone who was never paid much attention to and developed his own fantasy world in his head. I think one thing that is clear about him as an adult is that he doesnt fear the frightening or the grotesque, as most "normal" squeamish thinking folks would. He embraces it..he creates his own contributions to the definitions.

That doesnt make him a freak, but it would likely make him an outsider in his world at that time. Not like he could hang out with other Goths down at the mall. No Goth slam intended. ..it was the visual I was going for.

How many of us have people somewhere in our lives that are oddly detached from the rest of us. A cousin who youve never seen or heard speak at a family gathering. A friend who is inarticulate and awkward dealing with more than one person at a time. A tenant where you live who has black paint on his windows, never combs his hair or clothes and is only seen out sporadically and briefly.

Theres almost always nothing abnormal or wrong about any of those characteristics in behavior. Were all weird.

Idiosyncratic characteristics can have purely dark origins too......so I think this guy was alone by choice, steeled and trained for his future killing habits by some experiences with the process and preoccupation with the afterlife. I say afterlife because he doesnt seem to be to preoccupied with the physical process of death itself...its not like he watched them bleed out and their life leave them. He moved on. Death was a given to him, maybe more sacred than life in his mind, something he accepts easily. It facilitated his mutilations...thats all.

Best regards all.

[smezenen]

I totaly agree with you M&P the environment was not the only factor otherwise every kid that grew up at the same time in the same place would have been a Jack the Ripper. however not every person is wired to handle those conditions the same.
I have a brother that is constantly in trouble with the law, on drugs more than off, in jail more than out, and cant seem to hold down a job for more that a few months at a time. we grew up in the same house with the same parents so why did i turn out OK and he is haveing such a struggle. (I know its my opinion that I turned out alright).

[babybird67]

wow powerful post

I'm sorry, Christine but I have to object to that statement!

That truly is a biologically-deterministic statement if ever I saw one. Putting not only the motive but the specific MO and resultant signature down to a biological cause ignores entirely the influence of experience and development. People are complex, multi-faceted individuals and Jack was no better. Imagine Jack sulking in bed, sick with a cold, and annoyed because he couldn't go out if he wanted to, or changing his mind about killing someone because he promised a mate he'd meet him in the pub for an all-nighter. Silly? I think not.

His methods suggest a comfort with gore, and a deep inadequacy he feels. Why else destroy, even disfigure a woman, and making a show of it? It's a form of resentment, revenge and assertion of power brewed deep in his mind, and the reasons for that, if Jack explained them, we'd probably dismiss as too trivial to be reasonable. It's about meaning, and how people use and create it in their own lives.

It bugs me that serial killers are often dubbed "pathological liars" because the researchers refuse to accept some of the explanations they offer about their motivation. As a result, researchers try to "interpret," or "read between the lines," or search for secondary sources to confirm their theories. I imagine a lot of so-called abuse which is attributed to serial killers may be invented by the researcher, and evidenced with a good dose of confirmation bias.

thank you DP very interesting.

Reading your post i was reminded of things like the tragic Bulger case and the way in which media and understanding of what happened tries to cast it out of human experience altogether by making it "other"; some kind of "evil" which is really outside of human experience so we will put it out on the boundary and pretend it is only very very rare this capacity for evil. The truly horrifying thing is when you do realise that such terrors are within the human condition and perhaps it takes less to evoke them than we would care to admit (thinking of the acts for example of the Gas Chambers WWII and indeed the horrors of torture which abound even now, Rwanda, Zimbabwe etc).

It's all to convenient to try to attribute our baser instincts to something outside ourselves that can be safely kept there, when really they are lurking within everyone i suspect.

[babybird67]

oh hello

I agree with you on this one. I have started doing some investigations as to what regiments may have been back in London at this time before shipping out again, maybe after MJK. There do seem to have been a few posted back out to the Sudan, so its a distinct possibility

<scampers out of hole to wave a hello to a fellow newbie and fellow Gooner, then scuttles back inside to avoid thread derailment>