The most important murder to solve?

[j.r-ahde]

Hello Sara!

My impression of serial killers - naturally based on the articles I've read - is, that after the first killing they are shaky and nervous. When they don't get caught, the next one is easier...

Then they seem to develop a kind of cat and mouse -game for the crime investigators. Some of them have even felt a relief, while getting caught... So, terrible to say, maybe they develop a kind of mental addiction to their deeds?!

With the Ripper, I think the pattern could have been about the same; first shaky, second easier, etc.

What it comes to Stride and Tabram, I do include Stride to be the kind of "victim of interruption" category. With Tabram I am not quite convinced, but it's better to keep an open mind... I agree with you about the immediate danger with Stride. This situation could have convinced him about changing MO. Plus a probable feeling about the Vigilante Committee being on his heels amd very obviusly the girls on the streets of the East End becoming more cautious. The result leading to MJK, who probably thought herself to be safe indoors...

What it comes to the investigators prejudices, unfortunately they are human beings with a human factor!

All the best
Jukka

[Sara]

I've just spent a jolly evening reading up on the BTK killer Dennis Rader.
Part of the failure to catch him for so very long was the police refusal to believe that killings which didn't match his 'classic' pattern were his. if they had run through links etc to these other Wichita murders, his name might have surfaced sooner. Rader finally admitted to killings which had never been considered, so far removed were they form his core MO.

By the way reading his own accounts of the killings, it's notable what an atmosphere of panic some of them were carried through in - almost comically so, once the facts were known; whilst until he confessed, the killer was always considered to be totally cool, totally in control

Imo Stride and Tabram show sufficient likeness to Jack's MO to be probables.
Both took place in situations where he was in imminent danger of being caught, Tabram because it was relatively exposed and Stride because there were people about and possibly the sound of a cart approaching. they CANNOT be discounted on MO grounds alone

It's the investigators' collective prejudices which bedevil so many murder hunts.... surely we must all have learned this by now?

[Sara]

Why has it got to be two knifes? It could be a doubleheaded implement, maybe home made, like the type people make in prisons.

Possibly Jack on his first foray took two knives, not knowing quite what he would 'need' - psychologically that is. The impletments he had on that occasion were only good for stabbing, in the event - and he found when 'on the job' that stabbing didn't satisfy all his urges. That's why he left before 'finishing the job' in a way we might expect with the hidnsight of his later work.

But the next time, he had sought and bought the kind of knife he needed - for a ripping job. I'm as certain as one can be without proof or a confession that Tabram was Jack's - an exploratory kill which didn't quite do it for him, but which has enough similarities to make it impossible to dismiss as Jack's

I can't see any one killing as more important to solve than any other though

But, according to most Ripper experts, only John Pizer could have been Leather Apron. We can't ask Pizer if Mickeldy Joe was his friend, but my guess would be that he didn't know any such person, let alone did Pizer stay at no. Crossingham's Lodging House.

I must be getting old, cause that skipped by me Scott.

If the comment about Pizer isnt a part of a joke, obviously The Whitechapel Murderer became Leather Apron, who then became Jack the Ripper, courtesy of a hoax letter.

Personally I always thought The Spitalfield Slasher would have been good. Isnt that the real link the women have?

The thread point is that based on memos, innuendo, and the facts concerning the estimate of Kates death time...which can be roughly confirmed thanks to the PC's passes, isnt the Mitre Square murder the one murder where the suspect seen with her by the Three Wisemen almost must be her killer? Isnt that the sighting that most people believe spawned the "only" real witness that saw the killer Jack?

Thats why I suggested it....so, weigh in if you like.

Cheers Scott

[Scott Nelson]

But, according to most Ripper experts, only John Pizer could have been Leather Apron. We can't ask Pizer if Mickeldy Joe was his friend, but my guess would be that he didn't know any such person, let alone did Pizer stay at no. Crossingham's Lodging House.

In so far as gaining an insight into the killers psyche, I don't know how one could possibly place more importance on one victim over another. The progression is what tells the story, it show his evolution in so far as what he's capable of or willing to do. Mutilation is not some minor curiousity for him, it's his compulsion.

Hi Future MD,

You've missed the premise here, the disposition of the body or the injuries aside, its that this murder in Mitre Square contains more clues, more reputable first on scene sources, 2 potential police eyewitnesses and a witness that was suspected as being the one person that saw the killer they were calling Leather Apron a few weeks earlier.

My question is that would the fact that this murder seems to have the only believed sighting of Jack the Ripper in all 5 murders in it, and more police witnesses than any other, and a suspect who, by the timing alone, is almost certain to be her killer, make this murder more important "investigatorially" to solve?

If we solve this murder, weve identified the man they thought was Jack havent we?

Best regards

[FutureM.D.]

no varying degrees of evil

In so far as gaining an insight into the killers psyche, I don't know how one could possibly place more importance on one victim over another. The progression is what tells the story, it show his evolution in so far as what he's capable of or willing to do. Mutilation is not some minor curiousity for him, it's his compulsion.

Hello Mike,
I don't get you here. Do you mean that Mary's wounds were a desperate attempt to make any identification impossible?
If so, he shouldn't have killed her in her own room. And anyway, a woman was killed, so the risk of being executed was the same, whoever the victim was.

Amitiés,
David

Hi David,

I mean its very possible that the killer took Marys live with a knife, unplanned and in a moment of anger or madness, ..then did the savage acts to replicate a monsters. Its also very possible that Mary knew him based on the existing evidence of that night, and that would be the reason for him to do the dirty work.

If, for example, a spurned lover who is mad, kills her then wishes to direct the blame on someone else,.....was there ever a better opportunity to do so? They were even including a woman with a single throat cut as one of Jacks. How hard would it be to make Mary look like a Jack victim? All he has to do is have the guts to do it...and being mad, and knowing that if they assume this murder is from her local circle he will likely be caught and hung, he deflects all blame onto the shoulders of an unknown assailant being creditted with virtually every unfortunate kill from Aug 88 to 89.

Sam, I dont differentiate the chopping up of a dead woman and the cutting up of one as being signs of two distinctive levels of monster. To cut a struggling human with a knife is one level of psychopath, to cut into a dead body with a knife is another... but.... to cut the body into sections is only marginally different than that, in terms of the level of violence and cold heartedness the perpetrator is able to call upon.

Best regards all.

[DVV]

Marys wounds could have been caused by a scared, panicked person who feared execution

Hello Mike,
I don't get you here. Do you mean that Mary's wounds were a desperate attempt to make any identification impossible?
If so, he shouldn't have killed her in her own room. And anyway, a woman was killed, so the risk of being executed was the same, whoever the victim was.

Amitiés,
David

[Sam Flynn]

The answer to the question of whether 2 or 3 killers might co-exist in such a small area and time frame is within the historical data alone

We can't trivialise what Jack the Ripper did to the extent of labelling him a mere "killer", Mike.

so we really need not debate whether anyone besides Jack would have the stomach for that kind of work.

Yes we do. The "kind of work" Jack did was extreme - one hesitates to use the word "specialised", but the elaborate evisceration murders of the Autumn of 1888 surely were.

Clearly there were other(s)

There weren't, Mike. One might think that the Torso Murders came close, but rendering cold bodies into anonymous torsos before disposal has a long pedigree as a practical means for a murderer to cover their tracks. The anonymisation of the body is usually the main object of the exercise, rather than gaining pleasure from removing the head and limbs. Even if it were, that's not the same sort of behaviour as exercising one's "evisceration fetish" on a still-warm-and-throbbing human being by a long way - what Jack did was far more extreme, and required a different "stomach" altogether.

Hello folks,

The answer to the question of whether 2 or 3 killers might co-exist in such a small area and time frame is within the historical data alone, so we really need not debate whether anyone besides Jack would have the stomach for that kind of work. Clearly there were other(s), unless as Wickeman suggested, you intend to assoiciate all those deaths with a single killer Jack, not just the C5. And as Sam I and I agree with and many others also agree, there is at least one death within the "Canon" itself that shows no evidence of post mortem mutilation interest, and this death should be included with Jacks victims with caution. This may be a single murderer here.

If you look at all killings of unfortunates by knife in 88-89, then look at the ones that have post mortem mutilations, we are talking less than half of the killings. And excluded from that group but in that time frame would be someone, or more than one person, that had the stomach for sawing or cutting limbs and the head off a corpse. Twice.

I agree totally that the acts performed in room 13 required someone who could stomach the work, a very small percentage of any given population,.. but I do not agree that he had to have killed before, nor do I believe that there is any of the "precision" for lack of a better word that was evident in some earlier deaths, and those points and others....including the acts themselves, speaking to a killer who is unclear about what he wants, ...make me feel that the killer was known to Mary and he felt she had hurt him in some way. The abundance of appauling acts I believe indicates the killer sought to do as much Ripper type work as possible to ensure that the evidence pointed away from Marys circle.

Marys wounds could have been caused by a scared, panicked person who feared execution....and that might substitute for "the stomach" Jack had.

Best regards all.

[harry]

We do not know the extent of the killer's ambitions,therefor the difference shown in the mutilations does not mean a great deal.That the killer's interest lay with what was inside the abdomen appears self evident,and so I would hazard a guess that the stripping of flesh from the thighs had a similar intent,to access what was beyond the outer flesh.The fact that Kelly's murder took place in an enclosed room can be put down to opportunism,and the location Millers Court evidence of a more than casual knowledge of the place,it's occupant and her circumstances.I would say the same intent was present with other victims,but the time factor was not sufficient and in Tabram's case,the first in the series of killings,lack of preparation and experience,a cause of failure to even remotely achieve what he desired.
My opinion,but I go for the simplistic explanation.

[Sam Flynn]

You may say, "well they have to show the mutilations and eviscerations"....Oh, did Elizabeth Stride show those activities?

Well, I exclude Stride personally - for various reasons, among them the lack of mutilations. But that's beside the point. The point is that the existence of the aberrant behaviour of opening up someone's abdomen, eviscerating and the taking away their organs cannot be reduced to mere "cutting-up" by any reasonable definition of the term. Stride apart, the fact that four instances of this extreme behaviour turns up in the same part of town, within a few weeks, just cannot be explained away in terms of "anyone could do it".

[Wickerman]

...The murderer in Millers Court tried to pin Marys death on Jack the Ripper, and for many, he was successful. What keeps me from accepting this idea is that the ONLY resemblance that the Millers Court murder had to the others was that she was cut up. And since someone is cutting up people to make Torsos, which is someone not Jack most likely, and since someone kills and guts a woman much like Jack does the following year and the victim is not thought to be in a new Canon of 6, I feel safe in suggesting that not only Jack the Ripper killed and cut up unfortunate women during that period....

In general I would agree. Kelly should not be automatically assumed to have fallen victim to the same killer who took the lives of Nichols, Chapman, & Eddowes. I've given my reasons elsewhere on that and I'm reasonably confident that whoever killed Tabram/Turner was not the same person(s) as already spoken of above. So how many killers are we dealing with, two possibly three?
The killings of Stride & Coles appear very similar, a quick slash & run, not at all similar to what has gone before.
McKenzie may have been a copycat, which means another killer.
Then of course there's the Torso series. The idea one individual is responsible for all these localized killings is about as ridiculous as arguing that there were six killers all loose in this small corner of the city.
The truth must lie somewhere in-between - three killers?

In conclusion, I would have to say that I would not automatically exclude the Torso killings from the Ripper any more than I would automatically include Kelly as a Ripper victim.
By 'Ripper' I am designating the killer of Nichols, Chapman & Eddowes as 'Ripper' killings, - but even that assumption is arguable.
I guess I would have to say there is no single one important murder to solve, anymore than anyone suggesting the 'first' murder, .... how can we know who was 'first' unless we can correctly attribute any group of killings to any one individual?

To a point this has been done by some. The murders of Nichols, Chapman & Eddowes have been seen to show the most resemblances by way of signature, that is to say actions taken by the killer not directly concerning how the victim lost her life - but still an arguable point.
That there are more similarities between certain details of the murders of these three victims is certain, but it doesn't mean the same killer 'only' killed these three.

An afterthought...possibly thee most important murder of the Whitechapel series to solve is that of Mary Kelly. My reasoning is twofold;
1) That it is because of this murder that most of the ridiculous theories have been espoused.
2) This murder, if included in the Ripper series, takes away any practical argument as to motive for the previous murders of Nichols, Chapman & Eddowes.
The murder of Mary Kelly has caused more confusion and drivvel to be written about the Whitechapel murders than anything else.

regards, Jon

She'd had her entrails pulled out and internal organs removed, Mike. Whoever did it was a very different kind of animal from your "normal" murderer, or even your "normal" torso-killer, and an extremely rare animal at that. If there was someone else, other than the Ripper, who felt even remotely inclined to inflict that sort of damage on a fellow human being - in the same small geographical area, within a period of mere weeks to boot - then why haven't we seen this aberrant behaviour more often? That one person perpetrated the Ripper crimes is hard enough to explain or understand; suggesting that there were more than one operating at the same time requires a suspension of reason.

Hi Sam,

Im surprised to see you suggest a position that clearly cannot be accurate...that more than one killer running around cutting up women at that time requires a "suspension" of reason. In actuality all that is required to disprove that is reading a list of the women who were assaulted with a knife during the relevant years. You may say, "well they have to show the mutilations and eviscerations"....Oh, did Elizabeth Stride show those activities?

The facts are that someone likely not Jack did almost to the letter what "Jack" would have done in the case of Alice Mackenzie, ...very likely a different someone stabbed Martha Tabram to death, there was a Torso found in early October that was determined to have been created before Annie Chapmans murder, another killer.........Annie, Rose, The Pinchin St Torso the next year....all by one man, or three?

There is no doubt that there were other men killing other unfortunates with knives at that very same place and time, and in some cases the murders involved cutting the bodies and internal organs.

The notion that this killer had the entire city to himself and no other sick individual could possibly have done things like those Jack did...at the same time, usually comes from those who havent been following along very closely.

Best regards.