Let's narrow down some Ripper 'facts'

[curious]

Of course, Mrs. Long thought they were talking together.


Cheers.
LC

Hi, Lynn,
from the condition of Annie's body I don't believe for a second that Mrs. Long saw Annie Chapman and her killer at 5:30 a.m.

There are some possibilities:
1. simple mistaken identity

2. wrong day. I've already done the bit about how when people go to work every day, they really aren't paying attention, and one day drifts into another day, over and over and over

3. She saw Annie with her killer, knew the identification of the man with her would be very important, but the timing was off because Mrs. Long was out doing something that would explode her own world if the truth came out.

Let's say she was a married woman having an affair and so got up and left home early to meet a lover before work. (I understand people in these kinds of relationships do crazy things.) So, as she passed 29 Hanbury, there was Annie talking to a man.

Mrs. Long is very conflicted. The police need the man's description. It is very important that they have it, but if she tells the truth, Mrs. Long's own world will explode. So, she struggles what to do for a couple of days, then tells her story, one that is right in all ways except the time.

But Annie killed after 5:30 and already going into rigor at 6:15 and COLD?

I don't buy that for a moment. Others do. I can't make it make any sense. See the difference in body temperatures for both Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes at about the same supposed length of time. No, sorry. Not at 5:30.

[DVV]

TOD is too difficult to determine, even nowadays. Phillips acknowledged she could have been killed at 5:30.

Thanks for "Tennesseans", Errata, nice name.

[lynn cates]

belief

Hello Velma. I understand what you mean. I used to have a problem with the time as I could not believe that a cunning serial killer could take the chance of waiting until sunup.

Cheers.
LC

[curious]

Hello Velma. I understand what you mean. I used to have a problem with the time as I could not believe that a cunning serial killer could take the chance of waiting until sunup.

Cheers.
LC

That has nothing to do with it.

It is the condition of the body.

Eye witness testimony is notoriously inaccurate, but the cold body and beginning of rigor is what I believe should be considered here.

[DVV]

Eye witness testimony is notoriously inaccurate

And TOD is uncertain and approximative. It was a mere guess in 1888, Errata.
Mrs Long could be mistaken, but a matter of minutes, quarter of an hour...Phillips himself admitted he could have been one hour wrong. You're being more Catholic than the Pope.

[Hunter]

Lordy!

I reckon our Grits and Gravy cartel has been exposed. Trevor's gonna be after us like flies on honey. Maybe we should invite 'em to speak at our first annual meetin' at the Bell Witch House.

[curious]

Lordy!

I reckon our Grits and Gravy cartel has been exposed. Trevor's gonna be after us like flies on honey. Maybe we should invite 'em to speak at our first annual meetin' at the Bell Witch House.

How funny! I'll bring the biscuits!

[Wickerman]

We could probably blame those on his mother as well.

I'm thinking more along the lines of that which mummy wouldn't approve.

We struggle with schizophrenia and similar mental illnesses most likely due to our own lack of understanding of such mental disorders.
I sometimes wonder whether we are attempting to justify "Jack's" actions in some way, as if to say it was not his fault, he could not control himself.
Or, are we suggesting these potential causes because we wish to elevate him in the annals of crime to make him more like our modern sexual serial killers?

Certainly there was no shortage of suggestions at the time, yet for approx six weeks the papers carried opinions of Archibald Forbes who suggested the motive of revenge by someone who may have caught some sexually transmitted disease.

"Mr. Archibald Forbes, in a letter to the Daily News, says he considers it probable that the perpetrator of the murders is some wretch who has lost his career through dissipation. "The man's physical health ruined and his career broken, he has possible suffered specific brain damage as well. At this moment - I cannot use exact professional terms - there may be mischief to one of the lobes of his brain. Or he may have become insane simply from anguish of body and distress of mind. Anyhow he is mad, and his mania, rising from the particular to the general, takes the fell form of revenge against the class - a member of which has wrought him his hurt."

No need to justify the frequency or lack thereof of a "switch" mechanism, this predator just needed opportunity & let circumstances take their course.

Regards, Jon S.

[Wickerman]

Hi Ben.

There's certainly no evidence that the doctors examining Eddowes' body saw evidence of surgical skill, or that they concealed it from the media in order to prevent a backlash against their profession.

Surgical skill?, we were talking about anatomical knowledge. Contemporary medical opinion saw sufficient anatomical knowledge, and that is the point.

He said that the killer had no design on any particular organ, which means he could have been fumbling around with his hands and knife for something of interest, and came away with the uterus and kidney without necessarily knowing that they were.

You say "could", which tells me this is how "you" interpret Sequeira's words. No, it is not possible to evaluate any extraction and determine that the killer did not intended to remove what he did remove. That is just plain silly, Sequeira was a professional, he knew the impact of saying anything which might be construed as confirming the "Burking" theory.

The Coroner had already asked of Brown:

"Would the parts removed be of any use for professional purposes?"
and..
"Can you, as a professional man, ascribe any reason for the taking away of the parts you have mentioned?"

Sequeira knew he had to be tactful and not give the press anything they could make a story of.

You say the kidney was extracted in the "correct manner", but we know it wasn't. The easiest way to access the kidney is behind the patient or victim's back, i.e. not the way the killer went about it. It was also the quickest way,....

No Ben. You're on the wrong track with that, this is not the case at all.
I don't know anyone who is seriously suggesting he was only after a kidney, which would be the case if he only cut into her back.

The woman's abdomen had been opened consistent with a hysterectomy (of the period) and removed her uterus.
What are you suggesting, he then flips her over face down to cut through her back to get at the kidney?
How is this easy?
Not to mention all her intestines spilling over his shoes.

When I said "correct" ("carefully taken out") I was talking about the removal of the kidney from inside the fatty membrane.

There's two things to consider here:
First, the kidney is located inside a membrane, so he had two options, he could grasp the whole organ and pull it from the body, or he could pass a knife behind the membrane to slice it from the body.
The first option cannot be described as "carefull", the second option might, but a simple slice of the knife is too simple to be specially noted as "carefull".

The Second consideration is that he might have "carefully" passed the knife around the membrane to open it up and then remove the kidney from within. Certainly this would qualify as "carefully taken out", its a shame there is no mention of the empty membrane, that would have been conclusive.
But we only have notes to work with, not a detailed autopsy so we will never know.
So your "cut into her back is easier, therefore more correct" has nothing to do with what I was talking about.

....and yet the killer decided to forgo this option and hack away at the much thicker bone instead.

The words were:
"...an appearance as if an attempt had been made to separate the bones of the neck."

I think once again you exaggerate a detail which originally meant nothing more than that the knife had begun to cut between the vertebrae.
A rather forceful execution of the knife, deep and with sufficient pressure, might leave such an impression. The cut around the throat was described as "jagged" so he evidently was applying great force in a sawing action around her neck.

Regards, Jon S.

[DVV]

Hi Jon

Hi Ben.
Surgical skill?, we were talking about anatomical knowledge. Contemporary medical opinion saw sufficient anatomical knowledge, and that is the point.
Regards, Jon S.

I'd draw a different conclusion.

Brown : "I believe the perpetrator of the act must have had considerable knowledge of the position of the organs in the abdominal cavity and the way of removing them. It requires a great deal of medical [deleted] knowledge to have removed the kidney and to know where it was placed."

At this point, it would seem that the murderer could be a doctor, or at least a medical student, or something of the kind.

But not at all :
Coroner : "Would such a knowledge be likely to be possessed by someone accustomed to cutting up animals ?
Brown : Yes."

Now the man is, at best, a butcher.

Then, Sequeira : "I formed the opinion that the perpetrator of the deed had no particular design on any particular organ. I do not think he was possessed of any great anatomical knowledge."

Now it's a butcher at the very best, it seems. And Sequeira, stating that there was "no design of any particular organ", makes Brown's first point completely invalid ("it requires a great knowledge to have removed the kidney and to know where it was placed").

Lastly, Brown again : "The way in which the mutilation had been effected showed that the perpetrator of the crime possessed some anatomical knowledge."

Only "some" anatomical knowledge, now.
Finally, Brown came to agree with Sequieira. Not the reverse.

[lynn cates]

accept no substitutes

Hello David. All of which reinforces Baxter's claim that this was "unskilful" and possibly the work of an imitator.

Cheers.
LC

[DVV]

Hi Lynn, all of which confirms that the Baxter/Phillips theory is best forgotten.
An imitator wouldn't have disfigured Eddowes, don't you think ?
Or was he cunning to the extent that he thought "Err...if I take the uterus only and don't disfigure her, that will put an end to the well observed "scale" - ie : from Nichols to Chapman - and therefore the police wouldn't believe it is the same man..." ?

[caz]

Private Parts

Hi All,

Surely one can only ascertain the minimum knowledge/experience/skill levels of a killer from what he has done to his victims' bodies - never the maximum. One can say that a specific skill was or was not displayed, but not that the killer possessed no such skill, since there could be many (some pretty obvious) reasons for him being temporarily unwilling or unable to use it.

Iff al my pests wer rittan lik this noboddy cud asserten that mi riting skils wer evon poor neva mind nonexisitint. For awl annywon new i mite rite very wel in deed wenever it sootid mi porpoise.

The man who left Mary Kelly in that little room for example, surrounded by her bits and pieces, did not need to be a masterchef, but he could have been. He was not trying to create and garnish a signature dish for his overpriced West End restaurant at the time. The remains strongly suggest that he was acting out an out-of-hours fantasy for destroying and mutilating a dish that had been created and garnished by nature.

Whatever this killer did, he had the skill to do - obviously. But we cannot know what else he may have been capable of, or what he could have done better, if he had had more time, more light, or simply the inclination to show off to the best of his ability. Dumbing down may well have been in his better interests than playing to the crowd and exposing himself as masterchef, master butcher or skilled medical man. But who knows? He managed to remove Eddowes's kidney but we have no idea why he took it away with him or what became of it. There is always the possibility that he kept it as a trophy or consumed it, but had access to other human kidneys through his work and decided to send one of these to Lusk with a dumbed-down message.

Errata, you wrote:

Just so we're clear, Jews have unique laws and customs pertaining to the dead, but only one of them actually precludes murder. Cohens (the priest caste) are not allowed to touch dead bodies. And observant Cohen would adhere to this law.

The only reason our funerary laws might even pertain to this case is because a body has to be buried intact. You have to go out with what you came with. Which is why it wasn't until the late 1970s that anyone could come up with a way for a Jew to be autopsied. It is a fundamental teaching. I'm not at all observant and I don't know that I could overcome that conditioning. Does this mean that a religious Jew would not be a killer and keep a trophy? No. The Kletzky murder proves that. But in a very weird way, it's the bits strewn about that strikes me as discordant. Which I know is peculiar, but it's about on par with discovering a Buddhist is a cannibal. Not impossible, but the basic beliefs would be such a conflict with the behavior that it would be a little mind boggling. We Jews don't agree on any article of faith, but we all agree that you put the bits back in the body. The things we choose to care about.

A sensitive subject, and I'm not trying to be funny or offensive here, but I am curious. If you genuinely think the mother could be to blame - at least in part - for what her adult son did to Chapman, Eddowes or Kelly, could he not have been a Jew who took the above literally and feared he could not be buried intact because his mother had allowed a certain private part of his own anatomy to be cut off at an early age? Would every Jew grow up to understand and accept the apparent contradiction here? Or might a more simple soul see taking away the female bits of prostitutes as his revenge for losing out in the hereafter?

Love,

Caz
X

[lynn cates]

examination

Hello David.

"all of which confirms that the Baxter/Phillips theory is best forgotten."

Indeed? Even given that they actually examined the mutilations?

"An imitator wouldn't have disfigured Eddowes, don't you think?"

Well, not unless he had a "message" to deliver.

"Or was he cunning . . ."

Oh, quite cunning, I fancy.

Cheers.
LC

[lynn cates]

estudiantes

Hello Caroline.

"Iff al my pests wer rittan lik this noboddy cud asserten that mi riting skils wer evon poor neva mind nonexisitint. For awl annywon new i mite rite very wel in deed wenever it sootid mi porpoise."

Good heavens! You've met some of my students? (No, I am not jesting--wish I were.)

At any rate, your point is well taken.

Cheers.
LC