Is Kosminski the man really viable?

[Nemo]

Herbert Mullin was the serial killer I was thinking about

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Mullin

He is schizophrenic, religiously motivated, follows the orders of his auditory hallucinations, kills indiscriminately and brutally, yet shows a high degree of control in his selection of victims and weapons, escape and cleaning up and the like

[Nemo]

I thought that Kosminski being forcibly separated from his family and the synagogue due to his uncleanliness/madness provides good reason for him to be affronted by the sight of hypocritical Jews fraternising with prostitutes, extrapolating into a dislike of prostitutes soliciting Jews

There is an example of a schizophrenic killer who committed a multiple brutal murder because the victims were camping on land from which he had been expelled - his brutality being in retribution for their trespass (I'll look for his name in a minute)

Both the murder locations in the JtR case and the GSG seem apt in the circumstance where Kosminski perceives an injustice against himself within the Jewish community

I would think he would be schizophrenic but sane and capable while undertaking the Ripper crimes which I would expect to be opportunistic or, more likely IMO specifically targetted on weekends and particularly holidays

[Tom_Wescott]

P.S. Just for the record, Monty has known the identity of JTR for years, and his only motive for not making it public is he likes to watch us dance around like ants. Oh Crap, Admin's gonna ding me!

Oops, I posted this and then Admin put that new thread up. Coincidence? I think not!

Sir Robert,

What do you mean when you say just call out 'Abracadabra' and a new Kozminski find comes out?

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[bigjon]

As for the Macdonald Triangle, there is no empirical evidence that someone cannot engage in all three behaviors and turn out relatively normal. And Even if I could prove that everyone on the planet who had it was in fact a violent psychopath, I couldn't prove that it never happened in the past, or will never happen in the future. Macdonald did not study serial killers that we know of. I mean, there could have been one in there who was in for a bar fight and hadn't been discovered yet, but surely not a whole lot of them. We don't know if he studied psychopaths. It wasn't part of his study, he makes no reference to it, and in 1963 there was no reliable indicator of sociopathy. Given what we think now, that as many as 1 in 20 people are in fact sociopaths, and a great many repeat violent offenders do test as psychopaths, I think it's extremely likely that a good many of the violent offenders he interviewed were in fact psychopaths. Since it wasn't a factor in his study, and he didn't ask, we will never know.

But the modern criteria for the psychopath developed in the 1940's by Cleckley. And the DSM published in 1952 had a disorder named sociopathic personality disturbance which shared many criteria with Cleckley's disorder. While these may not have been as reliable as today's test, they were around and could be diagnosed/referenced. I'm not sure where you get your figure of 5% being the predominance of psychopathy, as most studies seem to estimate around .5-1%.

The Macdonald Triad probably is less dependent on the behaviors and more dependent on what those specific behaviors reveal. Fear, rage, antipathy towards others, anti social behavior, fetishism, bloodlust, shame, abuse, cruelty, sadism... all personality traits or behaviors that go along quite well with a serial killer. Certainly some of those conditions can be treated, but outside of a catastrophic episode, these are not kids who are going to be taken to a doctor. These are kids who are abused and ignored.

Perhaps for those who are unfamiliar we should describe just who the sample Macdonald used were - they were sufferers of mental illnesses who had threatened violent behaviour. Maybe I'm not familiar enough with the data to see how this is indicative of fetishism and blood lust?

[Phil Carter]

Coppelson

Hello all,

I am a firm believer in the development of history. Interpretations of what we know as historical fact can change. Whether that is, in this case, contemporary medical opinion on lunacy or suspect based Ripperology.

Having thought a little about this, I believe I may have something of a thought that might, just might help us in this problem over Kosminski/Aaron Kosminski-for or against.

Before 1905-1910 or so, the Polish Jew theory was relatively unknown. When it became general public knowledge via Anderson's book, following newspaper articles etc, the reception it received, was, I think fair to say, generally dismissive, both by the press and by Anderson's peers.

Between that time and 1959, almost no known development in the Kosminski/Polish Jew theory appeared. I say known, in general, because nobdoy actually knew of Swanson's annotations.

Then, in 1959, through Dan Farson, semi modern Ripperology began to start. Although Druitt was Farson's own little theory, the Kosminski name appeared through the collaberation of Farson with Lady Aberconway, resulting in the knowledge given us in print by Cullen, in 1965. In 1966, Odell really cemented the theory with the presentation of the original Macnagthen Memoranda.
It is from this base that modern Ripperology is based, which culminated with the marginalia and annotations being generally made public in the late 1980's.

It is from this base that the present Kosminski theory id founded. And it has been that way since, with 2010-2012 being a watershed period with the publishing of the Definitive History TV programmes, the Rob House book based on Kosminski as a Prime Suspect and history of the Swanson Marginalia in Ripperologist magazine. Hence a new era, or semi era, starts.

History is moving on it seems. It is developing.

However, there are other parts of history developing at the same time. Questions regarding 3 suspects previously regarded as the core base of suspect Ripperology have been asked. Articles and books looking at other answers, and in some, dismissing or re-arranging the importance of those three suspects (Druitt, Kosminski and Tumblety) has occured.

There are far more nay sayers against one, two or even all three of these suspects now than in say 1995. The general concensus of opinion has changed, to varying degrees in all three cases. And this is natural, I surmise.

A suggested comparison to all of Ripperology history is as far away from Jack the Ripper as it is as possible to go. I present it herewith for perusal.

Victor Marcus Coppelson (1893 - 1965) was an expert in his field. Namely, sharks and shark attacks. It was he who, when researching attacks that occured off the East Coast of the USA in the early years of the 20th Century, put together a definitive theory.

Coppleson set up practice in Sydney in 1922 and was on the surgical staff of St. Vincent's Hospital (among other various appointments) from 1923 to 1953 where he lectured in clinical surgery. He also lectured in anatomy at the University of Sydney 1923-34.

Jumping to his shark research, he published a book in 1962 on the feeding theory of sharks, in the main, the great white shark. It was he who developed the study of the "Rogue Shark" attack. Without going into too many details, it was this theory that influenced and was indeed quoted in, the book, a novel, "Jaws" written by Peter Benchley in 1974, and developed into the world wide smash film, and subsequent films, from 1975.

The idea was inspired by the several great white sharks caught in the 1960s off Long Island and Block Island by the Montauk charterboat captain Frank Mundus.Congdon offered Benchley an advance of $1,000 leading to the novelist submitting the first 100 pages. Much of the work had to be rewritten as the publisher was not happy with the initial tone. Benchley worked by winter in a room above a furnace company in Pennington, New Jersey, and in the summer in a converted turkey coop in Stonington, Connecticut. (Wikipedia)

As said, Jaws was published in 1974 and became a great success. Steven Spielberg is quoted as saying that he initially found many of the characters in the book quite unsympathetic and actually wanted the shark to win....

As far as the blockbuster film is concerned, in 2001, Jaws was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, judged to be "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". (my emphasis)

One can wonder why?...well it is two fold. Firstly, that the Rogue Shark theory was made from a theory into a general acceptance, and then, remarkably, changed Peter Benchly's attitude to the Great White Shark due to him visiting and being in the actual company of GWS's in their own environment, under invitation of a previous shark attack victim who first developed the shark cage idea. It was here that Benchley saw for himself the feeding habits of the GWS, and concluded that the shark was not particularly interested in the man in the cage, but the food dangling beside it.
Benchly then realised that the Coppelson theory of the Rogue Shark was being seriously questioned, and saw that attitudes and historical "facts" were developing away from the Rogue Shark idea of Coppelson's. He started supporting all sorts of things helping us to understand sharks instaed of trying to kill them off.

Today, Coppelson's ideas, once the be all and end all of historical thought on the subject, is now almost obsolete. And it is at this point I re-introduce the Kosminski theory.

Questions, important questions, are being asked and put forward to dismiss the importance of the Kosminski suspect, even more so Aaron Kosminski as the man that "fits" the bill of the Kosminski name.

In every area of history, there will be debate on the subject in question, to a certain degree. It is no different within Ripperology. And if the re-introduced promotion of the Kosminski suspect theory is not recieving the positive attention hoped for by some, then it is simply because times have changed and the theory itself has been relegated in the minds of many. Whether corect or nay, it is the way things are..and something we must accept as part of the development of the genre. Some will dislike this intensely. Some will applaud it. But whatever happens and in whichever direction the genre tourns, it simply has to be accepted.

These are my thoughts on the subject. I believe, being one og those who questions (especially) the candicacy of Aaron Kosminski as the Whitechapel Murderer, that it is only correct that those promoting Aaron Kosminski have to see that reaction against their theory is a sign of the times. Historical analysis is develping all the time..and that is the way it should be..like it or not.

best wishes

Phil

[Errata]

From your comments I take it you are (or were) some kind of an academic or mental health professional, so I'm going to give you a hard time on this one. Experience is one thing, but science isn't based upon experience. It's based on cold, hard facts. How do you know this without empirical support? How do you know that there isn't a small population who do exhibit all three signs but do not turn out to be serial killers?

It might be worth considering that in light of the fact that the sample in Macdonalds 1963 study weren't serial killers or psychopaths/sociopaths.

Hahah. I was a researcher for awhile, which I suppose is sort of academic. And I am a mental illness professional. In that I have put in more hours being mentally ill than any Psychiatrist has put into treatment. I consider mental health a necessary but enlightened hobby.

God help anybody who tries to apply cold hard scientific rigor to the social sciences. It would just lead to a lifetime of frustration and tears. Yeah, Psychiatry and psychology are soft sciences. Nobody knows anything for sure. I mean Bipolar is a disease with specific symptoms and specific causes. You think that a medication that targets those specific causes would work on Bipolar people. But it works on maybe 30% and half of those people don't get appreciably better. So medicating is an art not a science, and it's a total crapshoot about whats going to work.

As for the Macdonald Triangle, there is no empirical evidence that someone cannot engage in all three behaviors and turn out relatively normal. And Even if I could prove that everyone on the planet who had it was in fact a violent psychopath, I couldn't prove that it never happened in the past, or will never happen in the future. Macdonald did not study serial killers that we know of. I mean, there could have been one in there who was in for a bar fight and hadn't been discovered yet, but surely not a whole lot of them. We don't know if he studied psychopaths. It wasn't part of his study, he makes no reference to it, and in 1963 there was no reliable indicator of sociopathy. Given what we think now, that as many as 1 in 20 people are in fact sociopaths, and a great many repeat violent offenders do test as psychopaths, I think it's extremely likely that a good many of the violent offenders he interviewed were in fact psychopaths. Since it wasn't a factor in his study, and he didn't ask, we will never know.

The Macdonald Triad probably is less dependent on the behaviors and more dependent on what those specific behaviors reveal. Fear, rage, antipathy towards others, anti social behavior, fetishism, bloodlust, shame, abuse, cruelty, sadism... all personality traits or behaviors that go along quite well with a serial killer. Certainly some of those conditions can be treated, but outside of a catastrophic episode, these are not kids who are going to be taken to a doctor. These are kids who are abused and ignored.

[bigjon]

It's possible, I haven't worked with these people in 10 years. But even then it was an indicator, not a predictor. I know the urban myth thing came about because there have been studies that show that it isn't an actual phenomenon. Which I would have to rephrase to say that it isn't a common phenomenon. I have seen it. And there have been a few well known serial killers who have experienced it. It is obviously nowhere near as prevalent as movies and tv make it out to be. Certainly any kid can exhibit any of the Macdonald triangle at some point in their lives. Which is why it's really only considered when all three signs are present. Now I have never heard of anyone with the Macdonald Triangle not becoming either a serial killer or some other kind of violent psychopath. But not every violent psychopath experienced the Macdonald Triangle. In fact, the vast majority haven't. So in simplistic terms, it's presence indicates a violent psychopath, but it's absence does not rule out someone being a violent psychopath. So it's clearly of limited usefulness. Sort of like Albinism predicts skin cancer, But clearly you don't have to be an Albino to get skin cancer.

From your comments I take it you are (or were) some kind of an academic or mental health professional, so I'm going to give you a hard time on this one. Experience is one thing, but science isn't based upon experience. It's based on cold, hard facts. How do you know this without empirical support? How do you know that there isn't a small population who do exhibit all three signs but do not turn out to be serial killers?

It might be worth considering that in light of the fact that the sample in Macdonalds 1963 study weren't serial killers or psychopaths/sociopaths.

[Errata]

Forgive me, but don't most modern researchers consider the Macdonald Triad to be little more than an urban legend? There is little to no empirical research actually supporting it.

It's possible, I haven't worked with these people in 10 years. But even then it was an indicator, not a predictor. I know the urban myth thing came about because there have been studies that show that it isn't an actual phenomenon. Which I would have to rephrase to say that it isn't a common phenomenon. I have seen it. And there have been a few well known serial killers who have experienced it. It is obviously nowhere near as prevalent as movies and tv make it out to be. Certainly any kid can exhibit any of the Macdonald triangle at some point in their lives. Which is why it's really only considered when all three signs are present. Now I have never heard of anyone with the Macdonald Triangle not becoming either a serial killer or some other kind of violent psychopath. But not every violent psychopath experienced the Macdonald Triangle. In fact, the vast majority haven't. So in simplistic terms, it's presence indicates a violent psychopath, but it's absence does not rule out someone being a violent psychopath. So it's clearly of limited usefulness. Sort of like Albinism predicts skin cancer, But clearly you don't have to be an Albino to get skin cancer.

[Errata]

Wow.

Facts are like hens' teeth in this case. I don't discard them casually.

We are talking about different attendings over a course of years all saying that Kos hallucinated. Short of being there, I will accept it as evidence.

I will be curious to see what you say after you've read the book. Rob House is quite sympathetic to Aaron, who had the deck stacked against him from the beginning.

The most poignant part of it all is he is buried away from the rest of the family. A loving inscription on the stone, true - but kept at a distance.

I'm not sure I'm making myself clear. It IS evidence. But the doctor's conclusions are not fact, they are conclusions. Probably accurate ones. But in any evaluation of mental health the reliability from greatest to smallest is a patient self reporting, then a second parties observation of behavior, then a second parties conclusions about said behavior.

Take me for example. When I started getting sick, I went in and talked to a doctor about what was going on. And he talked to my parents as well, because I was a kid. My mother described what she saw me doing, how I was acting. My Dad, always a little fuzzy with boundaries, went in and told the doctor that I was just depressed because my best friend was moving away. So when coming up with a diagnosis, my reporting was the most important factor, then my mother's descriptions, and my dad's conclusion got a cursory mention I think. And this is the system of evaluation I not only grew up with, but used in a couple of jobs.

So Kosminski reports being delusion on one occasion. That's fact. Next I would take into consideration description of behavior. "He appears to be talking to someone who isn't there." "He cuts himself on the arms and legs every time he gets a sharp object" or " He exhibit signs of severe distress and fear when his mother visits.". The last thing I would take into account is "He is hallucinating." "He is Bipolar." "He hates men in positions of authority." It's just a reflection on reliability, not a reflection of fact or fiction. It's the method used to determine what is going on. And anyone using this method may come to the same conclusions that he weighted lower in the order of importance. But since any doctor has to come to his own conclusions, and not blindly accept what previous doctors have said, it's a necessary process. Because sometimes they don't agree.

Saying that Kosminski was delusional at least once is the same as saying that dark matter may exist. I believe dark matter exists. I've seen the math. I'm sold. But we've never found it, so I can't say that it exists like it's a proven fact. The same way I can't say the universe is infinite, that the ice age giant mammals all died out from disease, etc. I mean, if it's me and you just talking, I would say those things. But in trying to present a factual account of something, I fall back on accepted methods. It's an exceedingly cautious description based on a specific way of separating fact from theory. Even if the theory has a 99.9% chance of being right.

[Abby Normal]

We have no idea of what Kos was like in 1888.

Thats true, but we know what he was like only a few short years later, and these types of mental illnesses dont just spring up all of a sudden, they usually build up over time and i would bet that in 1888 that it would have manifested itself enough that Kos probably looked and acted out of the ordinary. IMHO of course.

[bigjon]

It's not really a citation. Serial killers, especially the ones displaying the Macdonald Triangle, start the fantasy process in their teens.

Forgive me, but don't most modern researchers consider the Macdonald Triad to be little more than an urban legend? There is little to no empirical research actually supporting it.

[Casebook Wiki Editor]

But if I am going to make a factual statement about Kosminski's delusions, I can't include anything other that what he reported himself. If I'm making a probable statement, I totally would include the observations of his doctors.

Wow.

Facts are like hens' teeth in this case. I don't discard them casually.

We are talking about different attendings over a course of years all saying that Kos hallucinated. Short of being there, I will accept it as evidence.

I will be curious to see what you say after you've read the book. Rob House is quite sympathetic to Aaron, who had the deck stacked against him from the beginning.

The most poignant part of it all is he is buried away from the rest of the family. A loving inscription on the stone, true - but kept at a distance.

[Errata]

Year after year? I think the attending physicians should be taken at face value unless we have a real clear reason to feel they would be unable to tell if someone was hallucinating.

Yes and no. Practically, they probably can be trusted to report accurately, but no because of the potential taint. It's like when you write a research paper, and you aren't allowed to use an encyclopedia as a source. There's nothing wrong with an encyclopedia, it's just not up to an academic standard. It's sort of like hearsay. Hearsay if often accurate, just not admissible evidence. And I do not argue that it shouldn't be considered, or given a certain amount of weight. But if I am going to make a factual statement about Kosminski's delusions, I can't include anything other that what he reported himself. If I'm making a probable statement, I totally would include the observations of his doctors.

[Casebook Wiki Editor]

but I still doubt even then if Kos would appear normal enough, at the height of the ripper scare, to make his victims comfortable enough to go with him to dark ally ways. I think Kos might look like Chase, but not jack the ripper.

We have no idea of what Kos was like in 1888.

[Casebook Wiki Editor]

When dealing with very old psychiatric records, from before the various diseases were well understood, the safe bet is to rely on self reporting before the observations of others. He reported his delusions once, in his evaluation. So he was delusional once. Other observations may in fact be very accurate, but could easily be actions that are misconstrued.

Year after year? I think the attending physicians should be taken at face value unless we have a real clear reason to feel they would be unable to tell if someone was hallucinating.