Let's narrow down some Ripper 'facts'

[DVV]

but he is taking the organs which can either be sold, or kept for himself as a trophy, if so; where the hell did he hide these for the rest of his life, because as a trophy, these would definitely have been in the killers house.. somewhere!

Definitely ?
We definitely don't know what he did with what he took.

[Errata]

True, and there's no such thing anyway. There are only people who are much more complex than the disorders they're lumped under.

Mike

There's no such thing as paraphilias?

[Malcolm X]

Intersting RYA.

But you still have to find a suspect to fit JTR and unfortunately this is where Sailor boy keeps cropping up, or a labourer, or a builder etc

[Malcolm X]

Sorry, but even if Garry is right pointing out "paraphilia", it doesn't mean a lot. There are dozens of paraphilias, categories and sub-categories. So yes, Jack was a paraphiliac. Which kind, though ? Necrophilia, necro-sadism, etc have been suggested. None really fits.

Ed Gein/ Albert Fish ? no not at all, he's not walking off with enough of the body to make Furniture out of them, or anything else !!!

but he is taking the organs which can either be sold, or kept for himself as a trophy, if so; where the hell did he hide these for the rest of his life, because as a trophy, these would definitely have been in the killers house.. somewhere!

[Hunter]

First (and this is restating Hunter's point above), "anatomical knowledge" is not an either/or proposition; it is just an epistemological discourse, not some innate defining property (like a uterus) that you either come equipped with or you don't. There would be a whole range of suspects in Victorian times--hunters and sportsman, people raised around livestock, ex-military man who served in the colonies, anyone who had traveled or lived on the frontiers of the Americas--who might have accumulated some measure of proficiency in killing and dressing mammalian animals for food, clothing, or other resources...

Exactly

Secondly, my experience in reading about this particular case is that many writers have an annoying habit of letting the suspect revise the evidence, rather than the other way round. Thus, for example, anytime I read a long passage about "anatomical knowledge," either for or against, I know I'm about to get a suspect that fits this imaginary criteria. Thus the killer becomes the mad doctor or the unemployed laborer who lives in the doss house arose the street (mental illness is another category of this type). Silly stuff, really.

Exactly again.

... there is no particular reason to believe that Eddowes killer fumbled, or bumbled, or mismanaged the removal of Kate's uterus anymore or less than that of Chapman. Depending on how you read the sometimes obtuse testimony from each inquest, it would be equally easy to draw exactly the opposite conclusion. Chapman's killer, as far as I can tell, laid open the pelvic region entirely, flaying the pubes from the body (Swanson says this in an internal report--he also mentions other flaps of skin taken away by the killer, all of which Phillips demures about at the inquest). Having done so, the killer appears to have laid the knife behind the pubic bone and made a single indiscriminate scooping cut, lifting away uterus, appendages, and the cul de sac of the vagina (and most of the bladder). Phillips was much impressed by this, as well as how the killer avoided incising the rectal cavity. But frankly, its hard to even know from this if the uterus was even specifically the target of the mutilation.

You are right on the money again. That Chapman's killer avoided the rectum and left the cervix intact may be by accident rather than design. He basically just cut out a chunk and took what was in it and left what was behind.

By contrast, Eddowes's killer was precise: he lopped off the uterus, appendages and ligaments (albeit leaving the "stump" behind), yet he left intact both bladder and vaginal canal. This is even more interesting when you consider that while Chapman's murderer may have been able to see what he was about, the poor lighting conditions and clumsy vertical incision used in the Eddowes case made it more likely that her killer was operating by touch alone. Neither of these extractions look like anything a surgeon or a medical student would do...

You're on a roll! As I said in a previous post, this was an entirely different realm for everyone involved. Each subsequent murder left more specific clues. The murderer did target the uterus and knew where it was. It would be remarkable that this was mere happenstance on three occasions. But his method only shows that to be the case and nothing more. He acquired the knowledge somehow because he was interested in it. Medical books that displayed anatomical diagrams and even volumes such as Krafft-Ebing's very recent offering, were picked up by male adolescents and young men as a form of pornography. even amongst the lower classes.

A curiosity is naturally going to result in exploration. For most young males, this natural tendency is more innocuous and part of the normal attraction developing for the opposite sex and it involves much fantasizing (yea, I remember them days). It insures the procreation of the species. Here, however- for whatever reason- it turned into some kind of aberration that went even farther and was acted out in morbid reality. The medicos didn't understand this at first, because it had never been seen by them before ( at least in a repetitive fashion.) You have to understand who Bagster Phillips was, but I doubt he ever came to any conclusion outside of the physical evidence itself. It was up to the detectives, as far as he was concerned, to make conclusions on the evidence in its entirity.

That's why Thomas Bond was eventually called in because he was considered to have credentials in criminal psychology as well as forensic experience, whether some of us now, agree with his assessment or not.

[DVV]

Indeed, Mike. And such disorders will always be a step ahead terminology.

[The Good Michael]

Sorry, but even if Garry is right pointing out "paraphilia", it doesn't mean a lot. There are dozens of paraphilias, categories and sub-categories. So yes, Jack was a paraphiliac. Which kind, though ? Necrophilia, necro-sadism, etc have been suggested. None really fits.

True, and there's no such thing anyway. There are only people who are much more complex than the disorders they're lumped under.

Mike

[DVV]

Sorry, but even if Garry is right pointing out "paraphilia", it doesn't mean a lot. There are dozens of paraphilias, categories and sub-categories. So yes, Jack was a paraphiliac. Which kind, though ? Necrophilia, necro-sadism, etc have been suggested. None really fits.

[Errata]

In short, he was a paraphiliac, not a paranoid schizophrenic.

First of all, Bravo on referencing paraphilias. That doesn't come up nearly enough. Though personally I favor a Dennis Rader/Ed Gein model. A generally normal guy (who actually might be a prig) whose abusive childhood produced an untenable mix of mutilation/sex/mommy. Norman Bates if you will. Without the dressing up part.

[Malcolm X]

yes Necrophilia certainly fits the bill or more likely a variation of this, because Necrophilia is more about having sex with the dead, and this is not what he was about, but i cant think of anything else to call it.

if this is true, whatever he asked for these women to do, obviously upset them, which resulted in a swift response from them, i.e ``clear off you sicko`` and this in turn caused him to fly into a childish temper tantrum...... maybe!

he thus attacked them, targeting that area, sometimes.

i sense with these non JTR murders, a swift sudden careless attack, after something has gone wrong, he's then legging it at high speed. it looks like he's got something sexual on his mind.

why so careless before and after JTR, because he can no longer be JTR, so he's returning to the way he once was... or this is another killer !

but to be honest i've no idea.

.

[Errata]

Caz,

Great post as usual. You seem to save them up...a good thing, To piggy-back onto your thoughts while taking Errata's comments under consideration... if a Jewish murderer/errant Cohen believed in such things as all body parts needing to be there or there would be no afterlife, by depriving women of parts, would he feel ensured that they couldn't come back to get him? Kelly, of course, being a definite 'no'. I don't know what is believed about ghosts and vengeance and that sort of thing. There is something about the soul having difficulties returning to a mutilated body... I don't remember any more however.

Mike

Good questions, both of you. And nothing is a sensitive topic as long as it is approached with respect.

The answer to both is probably not. Here's why. Circumcision is a covenant between G-d and man, binding the Jewish people to him alone. It is considered so important that the only acceptable reason for failing to circumcise a child is if the life or the health of the child is at risk, like for example, if a child has hemophilia. In fact, some orthodox communities will circumcise the corpse of someone who could not have the ritual performed before burial.

As for the burial rituals, well, they are really really (really) complicated. But the gist of it is that it is the responsibility of the community to insure that the body is buried intact. If that cannot happen for some reason, that's okay. It doesn't affect the soul of the deceased. Remember these laws came from a time where animal attacks were not unheard of, and sometimes you just can't get stuff back. But the failure reflects on the community, not the deceased.

One of the things to remember is that we don't have an afterlife per se. We don't have Heaven or Hell. We have dead, and Resurrected. When we die, that's it until at some nebulous point in time the Messiah shows up and leads the righteous into the Garden of Eden (maybe). We don't know if we're going to need our physical bodies intact. We are preparing for the possibility. Hedging our bets if you will.

As for spirits, ghosts, whatever, we have the superstitions, but they aren't a part of our faith. Mostly we picked them up after the Diaspora from stories that were a part of the tradition of wherever we were living. But we don't become ghosts. There is a fragile point in time after death where our spirit can be dislodged by a demon (according to some traditions, Lilith being a common one) which is why the body is never left alone from the time of death until burial. But these strictures and superstitions have never applied to those of other faiths.

So I could say absolutely not, but I say probably not because who the hell knows in the end. Zealotry and bastardization of religion happens. A guy could have decided he knew better than everyone who taught him, in a David Koresh kind of way. In a benign form, that almost exactly describes Lubavitchers. But zealots tend to try a gain followers, so I don't think that's what happened here. I won't say never, but I will say not very likely.

[Rya]

I have been following this thread with some interest and amusement, and at the risk of entering the crossfire, I'd like to make a few suggestions.

First (and this is restating Hunter's point above), "anatomical knowledge" is not an either/or proposition; it is just an epistemological discourse, not some innate defining property (like a uterus) that you either come equipped with or you don't. There would be a whole range of suspects in Victorian times--hunters and sportsman, people raised around livestock, ex-military man who served in the colonies, anyone who had travelled or lived on the frontiers of the Americas--who might have accumulated some measure of proficiency in killing and dressing mammalian animals for food, clothing, or other resources. Some, like more modern serial murders of the Kemper or Gein variety, may have even experimented with animal (or even human) anatomy through more clandestine means. In any event, none of these fellows would have anything like the "anatomical knowledge" that a medico or a slaughterman would possess or recognize, nor would they spend their evening studying Grey's. They would be mostly or entirely self-taught, and would have their own idiosyncratic method for accomplishing whatever task they had in mind. The killer could easily (most likely, actually) have been such a person.

Secondly, my experience in reading about this particular case is that many writers have an annoying habit of letting the suspect revise the evidence, rather than the other way round. Thus, for example, anytime I read a long passage about "anatomical knowledge," either for or against, I know I'm about to get a suspect that fits this imaginary criteria. Thus the killer becomes the mad doctor or the unemployed laborer who lives in the doss house aross the street (mental illness is another catagory of this type). Silly stuff, really.

Thirdly, I think it is fool's gold to use one doctor's opinion against another with these murders, since it is easy to find places where they all said eminently stupid things, even people who I would otherwise consider very qualified and smart. So I usually ignore the opinionated statements of the medicos, and focus entirely on the material facts such as we have them. Thus, Bond's comment that rigor mortis progressed during his examination of Kelly's body means a lot to me, but the his opinion that she was dead twelve hours when he began his examination (extremely unlikely, by the way) does not.

Lastly, there is no particular reason to believe that Eddowes killer fumbled, or bumbled, or mismanaged the removal of Kate's uterus anymore or less than that of Chapman. Depending on how you read the sometimes obtuse testimony from each inquest, it would be equally easy to draw exactly the opposite conclusion. Chapman's killer, as far as I can tell, laid open the pelvic region entirely, flaying the pubes from the body (Swanson says this in an internal report--he also mentions other flaps of skin taken away by the killer, all of which Phillips demures about at the inquest). Having done so, the killer appears to have laid the knife behind the pubic bone and made a single indisriminate scooping cut, lifting away uterus, appendages, and the cul de sac of the vagina (and most of the bladder). Phillips was much impressed by this, as well as how the killer avoided incising the rectal cavity. But frankly, its hard to even know from this if the uterus was even specifically the target of the mutilation.

By contrast, Eddowes's killer was precise: he lopped off the uterus, appendages and ligaments (albeit leaving the "stump" behind), yet he left intact both bladder and vaginal canal. This is even more interesting when you consider that while Chapman's murderer may have been able to see what he was about, the poor lighting conditions and clumsy vertical incision used in the Eddowes case made it more likely that her killer was operating by touch alone. Neither of these extractions look like anything a surgeon or a medical student would do (if I had done such a thing in dissection during my school days I would have been shot). But they are not the project of complete ignorance, either.

And don't even get me started on the kidney business.

[GregBaron]

Not the studious type...

This talk of anatomical knowledge got me wondering about the medical book thing also as i had posted earlier. If JtR was fascinated with the insides of the female body (and it seems he was) i wonder if he could have got his hands on an anatomy book of some sort?

Hey Abby,

Since no one else will answer your query I’ll entertain it myself. Of course he could have had access to some sort of book. But my inclination is that Jack wasn’t the bookish type. I go with a low-life borderline illiterate scoundrel variety. I doubt he spent his evenings studying his Funk & Wagnall’s.

He had a sexual perversion centered on the female reproductive areas. That’s all we know. He hated women or he feared women or he resented their sexual power or he wanted them but was impotent or had some other sexual inadequacy that threw him into a rage. These are simply possibilities.

Or maybe he was fond of offal and found this the cheapest way to acquire his dinner. As Caz says, we can’t know his motivations, we can only guess……..

As for his anatomical knowledge, I’m sticking with my (and others) contention that he was skilled with a knife and had seen butcheries or himself cut up animals. As pointed out many times, this would have been quite common among the classes we are describing.

But back to your original point, I don’t believe he learned the kidney position from Gray’s Anatomy although it was originally published in 1858...….


Greg

[Malcolm X]

Hello Malcolm. Jacob Isenschmid.

Here you go.

http://forum.casebook.org/showthread.php?t=4590

Cheers.
LC

he looks ok to me, relatively normal, cheeky/ funny looking, but he does look old, depending on how old the photos are that is.

[DVV]

Whatever his identity, Jack the Ripper was not suffering any significant degree of psychosis. Most likely, he was an Arthur Shawcross-type individual who was perfectly sane and acting upon a longstanding sexually orientated fantasy centring on the evisceration and general destruction of women.

In short, he was a paraphiliac, not a paranoid schizophrenic.

Hi Garry, while I agree JtR was certainly closer to Shawcross than to Mullin (understatement), I wouldn't say Shawcross was perfectly sane.
As for paraphilia, I find it merely a modern synonym of "perversion" (a necrophiliac and, let's say, a foot-fetichist are both paraphiliac, right ?).