Can George Chapmam reform himself to being a calculating poisoner seven years later?.

[Natalie Severn]

I believe that psychological profiling is much more in our consciousness today than it was then, and much more respected and believed than 100 years ago.

This,Helena is addressed to yourself and Wolf and Errata.There is something wrong with the thread technically as I can't post except as part of your post.Will sort it tomorrow.



On psychological profiling and the efforts here to rule out Klosowski :



It seems to me people here can't see the wood for the trees! You seem to think in such rigid boxes that you have to fit the identity of the ripper into pseudo scientific theories about the motivation and method of serial killers ,which lead you to ignore the salient fact that all the while in the heart of the locality in which the murders were committed in 1888 lives one Severin Klosowski aka George Chapman,a convicted murderer of women .

[Errata]

One has to take into account the difference between a "serial killer" and a multiple murderer.

A multiple murderer can and does easily change weapon, MO, signature, motivation, even body disposal. Take someone like Bugsy Seigel. He strangled or beat prostitutes to death as a warning (some even think the Black Dahlia) He shot people in the course of robbery, in the course of protecting others, as a hit. He stabbed, he cut throats. He did it for business, for pleasure, out of anger, or out of greed.

He is not a serial killer. He however could easily have poisoned a series of girlfriends. He was a con artist. And killing is often an extension to a con.

Jeffrey Dahmer could not have done what Bugsy Seigel did. Jeffrey Dahmer could not have killed such a variety of people in a variety of ways. They are called "serial killers" because they kill serially. Which means in order, one after another. But a series has to have commonality. It has to have a binding thread woven through. A picture of an apple, a picture of a truck, and a picture of Babe Ruth are not a series. Even if the photos were taken sequentially. A picture of a seedling, a picture of a tree, and a picture of firewood IS a series. Each picture builds on the last. And while they make sense individually, you only understand the vision when seen together.

To believe that George Chapman could commit both crimes is to believe that Jeffrey Dahmer could stop being Jeffrey Dahmer and start being Bugsy Seigel. Or probably more aptly, That Jeffrey Dahmer could become the Beltway Sniper.

[HelenaWojtczak]

In #162 Wolf puts his case most persuasively. Put like that, it all rings true to me. My belief that SK cannot have been JtR has now been ratched up another notch as a result of it.

I'd just like to add that there is a popular fantasy that JtR was an insane, bloodthirsty, homicidal maniac by night and a normal, sane, decent bloke by day, who nobody could have suspected. (I think this fantasy might be fuelled by tv "whodunnits" in which the murder is the last person one would suspect. Wolf reminds us that this cannot possibly have been the case.

Norma, why haven't you written a book about SK? I know you are busy with another project now, but why haven't you written about him instead. Does anyone know if anyone is currently writing one? I might start a new thread.

Helena

[Wolf Vanderlinden]

Abby Normal.

…who's to say that someone could not have the psychological reasons to kill 2 series of women in 2 different ways at different times?

Several experts in crime and criminal psychology who have written on the subject that’s who.

You, and most other posters on this site, fail to take into account the rare psychopathology that makes up the type of serial killer known as a “ripper/stabber.” These individuals are driven to do what they do for various complex psychological reasons. The Whitechapel Murderer, who ever he was, murdered, mutilated, posed the bodies of his victims for shock value and then walked away with trophies stuffed into his pockets. Murder, in this case, seems only to be an ends to a means – mutilation of the body and the collection of body parts. He did it because he had to do this in order to satisfy his aberrant psychological needs and he needed to increase the mutilations after each victim for the same reason. By the end of the murders his mental state would, apparently, have been breaking down and those around him would have likely noticed his mental deterioration. The Ripper, after all, was not sane or normal mentally. This does not fit with Severin Klosowski.

Would you look at two series of crimes of say, auto theft, an earlier series(unsolved) that the method was violent carjacking, and then a later series of auto thefts where cars were stolen with obvious meticulous planning from a car dealership (solved) and conclude that the person who committed the later series could not possibly have been the same as the first based on different M.O.? I think not, nor would any good detective.

Auto theft is not the same as murder let alone serial murder let alone serial ripper/mutilation murder. The carjacker, presumably, wasn’t compelled by his dark, inner demons to steal cars and to steal them in a particular psychologically satisfying way. You have also used M.O. here to try and make your point but have left out Signature. What if the carjacker always painted a large X in red spray paint at the scene of his crimes. This didn’t help in stealing the cars in any way and in fact it was a dangerous waste of time. If the second series of carjackings were completely unlike the first and the signature was also absent then it is highly probable that any detective would conclude that the first series of carjackings were not perpetrated by the same individual as the second.

Wolf.

[Wolf Vanderlinden]

Hi Norma.

Ben has done an excellent job in responding to your posts. I pretty much agree with everything he says but I’ll add my own thoughts as well.

Inspector Abberline was a police expert and very good detective. He thought Chapman was the Ripper. So there we have a police expert of sound experience.

Had Abberline simply stated that in his opinion Klosowski was the Ripper, and left it at that, this discussion would be very different. No one would know why he thought this or what official Whitechapel Murders Investigation information he might have used to convince him of Klosowski’s guilt. Fortunately Abberline told us exactly why he came to suspect Klosowski and his reasoning proves that he didn’t know what he was talking about. He may have been a very good detective but he knew absolutely nothing about serial killings or the psychopathology of serial killers and most of the facts he used to illustrate his suspicions were wrong.

The trouble with Chapman is we know so little about what he did in terms of criminal deeds between 1887 say and 1897.

What criminal deeds? Other than the Borough Poisonings and his insurance scam there is absolutely no evidence of any criminal deeds at all.

How do we know that Chapman didn't murder numbers of homeless women during his time in these places ?

As above. Where is the evidence that he did?

So in my own opinion Chapman could have been a serial murderer who took the lives of his 'wives' solely to prevent the main business of murder ever coming to light.

Klosowski was a serial murderer: he murdered three women by poison, but again, neither you nor anyone else has provided an ounce of proof that he killed anyone else. Basically you are saying that because you theorize that Klosowski was the Ripper you can now let your imagination run wild and make up any number of murders and then use them to bolster you original theory. You aren’t using facts but fiction to support yourself.

Wolf.