Is Eddowes demise the key?

[DVV]

and remember the origin of the C5 concept orginated from ONE medical man- in a report to Anderson
Phil

Hi Phil, it's time to realize that Bond didn't play such an eminent role in the establishment of the so-called canon.
He was given the notes of the Buck's Row, Hanbury St and 30 Sept murders, but was never asked to decide whether Tabram and Smith could have been early victims of the same individual.
And in 1889, he expressed the opinion that McKenzie was a Ripper victim.

Case closed on this point, don't you think ?

[DVV]

However, the facial mutilations with Eddowes and Kelly could simply reflect a "normal" escalation of violence.

Agreed, my dear.......

Or are the facial mutilations meaningful beyond this?

............but that is still a good question, Barnaby.

[DVV]

Phil, the canon has been created by :
-Baxter and Phillips
- Evening News, 1st October 1888
-Misunderstanding of Bond's "profile"
-Macnaghten memo

And later on, by best selling authors who found convenient to focus on 5 victims only.

[caz]

Personally, I think Eddowes is the key to the motive. Serial killers tend to be very ritualistic. They have a routine. Something dramatic has to happen in order for them to break the routine. The argument with Kelly is that he broke his routine because he was indoors. But what caused him to break his routine and escalate with Eddowes? Why did he cut up her face? He was pressed for time, he was not as secluded as he had been with other victims. And if popular theory is true that he was frustrated by not getting Stride, he would be more inclined to stick with his ritual that ever. His discomfort would not appear in new injuries, but in the savagery of the consistent injuries. I think he cut her face because he had to. He could not continue with his ritual with her face looking at him. So why her face? Did he know her? Did she look like someone? That's why I think she's the key. He broke his routine because of her, and that just doesn't happen unless a keen amount of stress is on the killer. Usually it means the killer thought he was about to get caught and so does not do what he ordinarily would do. It's interesting when he feels the need to add something to his routine in order to relieve stress. Like facial mutilations.

Hi Errata,

Discomfort or stress, then? That is the question. If discomfort would have made him stick to routine, while stress would have made him break it, the distinction becomes rather crucial - or meaningless. He must have felt like a push-me pull-you.

It's both, isn't it? He would not have had the discomfort of having to leave Stride unripped unless he thought he would be caught if he stayed, causing him a keen amount of stress, which he relieved within the hour in Mitre Square, by mutilating Kate's face. The discomfort he relieved with his routine of overpowering another unfortunate and cutting her throat with fatal precision.

Simples.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Forgive me if this has been addressed already, but I've been thinking (a dangerous pasttime, I know):

Has anybody ever looked into the frequency of murder vs. the frequency of murder by knife in the White Chapel Area for the years surrounding the WCM?

My hypothesis if knives might have been the weapon of choice in such a poverty stricken area said information may shed some light on which murders might be attributable to Jack and which may be murder as usual in the East End.

Hi D.B,

Not quite what you asked, but Colin Roberts has produced some fascinating statistics for murder of adult women by knife (any kind of fatal knife wound, so not specifically throat cutting, slashing, stabbing or ripping) in the whole of England during the 1880s. I think his criteria make for the fairest comparison.

Turns out there were eleven such murders in 1887, eleven again in 1889, but seventeen of the buggers in 1888. We already know the details of the extra six, from Tabram to Kelly, between August and November in a teeny tiny area of the country, all within strolling distance of each other.

I can't see how adding in child murders, murders of males or non-knife murders from the same three years would give us a better bigger picture than this one, of what was going down in Whitechapel in the second half of 1888. It would only muddy the waters, but maybe that's the whole idea. They seem all too clear to me and the lone shark is grinning up at us.

Love,

Caz
X

[lynn cates]

Let me see your ID please.

Hello Caroline. Why would the murders of 18 and 19 year olds count as child murders?

Cheers.
LC

[Errata]

Hi Errata,

Discomfort or stress, then? That is the question. If discomfort would have made him stick to routine, while stress would have made him break it, the distinction becomes rather crucial - or meaningless. He must have felt like a push-me pull-you.

It's both, isn't it? He would not have had the discomfort of having to leave Stride unripped unless he thought he would be caught if he stayed, causing him a keen amount of stress, which he relieved within the hour in Mitre Square, by mutilating Kate's face. The discomfort he relieved with his routine of overpowering another unfortunate and cutting her throat with fatal precision.

Simples.

Love,

Caz
X

Maybe. It certainly makes a kind of sense.

But there is an addictive behavior component to serial killer behavior. Most of this comes from an old professor who studied them so it's not I'm talking with the authority of Jesus or anything, but according to his research, it's kind of like this:
I'm a smoker. A very addicted one. Now that you can't smoke in airports I HATE flying. I have to fly for 7 hours to see my mother, and now my fiance HATES flying because I become unlivable. The desire to kill for a serial killer is akin to my desire to smoke. I don't want to smoke all the time, but I want to smoke when I want to smoke. If I can't smoke, I become very uncomfortable. It gets worse the longer it goes. I can't think of anything other than how to get around the reality of the situation and find some way to smoke. I will go outside when I know I will have to go through security again, which during the holidays is ludicrous. I will try to smoke in the airport bathrooms, which has a hefty fine. I have seriously considered handing a stewardess $1000 dollars and then walking into the airplane bathroom to smoke.
So obviously the first thing I do when I land at my destination is smoke a cigarette. The first thing a serial killer does when he can relieve his discomfort is kill. Now when I land, I don't eat a cigarette, fire up a cigar, or put a plug of tobacco in my mouth. That's not what I want. I want my regular delivery system, which is a cigarette. I may chain smoke a few before getting my luggage, but I don't change my behavior. Just maybe the intensity. A serial killer will do what he fantasizes about. Thats what relieves the discomfort. If he's put off, the intensity may change, but the fantasy remains the same.
So when a serial killer changes the routine that he knows gives him satisfaction, the question is why. Over time, the reality of the killing loses it's intensity. The buzz wears off. The fantasy that fuels the killing slowly adapts, adding new facets to the kill. But it's a slow adaptation, and it's an adaptation that occurs when the original fantasy is no longer enough. Which takes time AND experience. Someone who only has one cigarette a month is still going get a buzz when he smokes it. When he's up to a pack a day for a couple of years is when he doesn't feel it anymore. So if it's a one off then why? Intense sudden stress. Sometimes there is a reminder of something the killer would not like to be reminded of in that moment. I think it might have been Kemper who let a woman go because she was a nurse, and he couldn't do it. But it doesn't happen often, and when interviewed, serial killers who have done this have explained some kind of relationship to the victim they did not expect. So it seems as good an explanation as any.
Then again, I'm not a big believer in the C5, and I don't think Kelly was killed by the same man as Eddowes, so clearly I am biased.

[Henry Flower]

shoulda woulda coulda

Firstly, I'd like to thank Phil Carter for clearing-up the detailed statistical evidence re Whitechapel knife-crimes against females:

"from 1880 onwards there are a number of cases"

Truly helpful.

Mr Carter, you accept that the first two of the C5 were performed by the same hand - which is why I'm so very baffled that you think that Eddowes and Kelly are the work of another perpetrator. You believe that one particular autumn, in a very small area of Whitechapel, there were not one but two men who had a penchant for cutting women's throats deeply, and using a knife to stab at their abdomens, removing sections of intestine and various internal organs.

You concede the same hand is at work in Nichols and Chapman - two very different sets of injuries - yet you think a different hand must've been behind the final two because Kelly's injuries are so different from Nichols'! You may be right, or wrong, but you're not even being true to your own logic.

I think the problem stems from the belief that seeps through your postings that you know exactly what to expect in terms of a killer's M.O. You infer that because Nichols and Eddowes were both killed in the street you'd expect more mutilation in the Nichols case were the killer the same person. Frankly, that's piffle, and arrogant piffle at that. The notion that all serial killers have a fixed and unchanging M.O. right from the start is nonsense. If Nichols was an opportunistic, exploratory event, or a rage killing which gave some sicko a taste for going further, then we can't necessarily use that event as some kind of mathematically predictive template. You always seem to assume that you know what a single killer who finished his work with Kelly should or would certainly and inevitably have done, given the precise and proven algebra of serial killer behaviour that you have filed away in your head.

It's not that simple. I wish it were.

Further, you use CAPITALISATION to insist on our discounting the possibility that the Stride murder was interrupted. Why? Unless she was unlucky enough to be attacked twice in the same location on the same night, then we know that an assault on the woman was witnessed, and that the man beginning the assault knew he was seen. So the idea that this was a Ripper killing that was interrupted isn't 'mere' supposition. It's an educated guess, it's at least as likely as any of yours. I've heard Stride dismissed as being 'too far south' to have been Jack's work. Again, we think we have him neatly prescribed. If his actions were this easy to predict/extrapolate/contain then it's a wonder indeed that we haven't named him. After all, remove Stride's killing from the map and we'd be insisting that Eddowes' killing was too far south, or too far west. I mean, it's so far out it's a completely different police force! And we know that Jack only killed in areas policed by the Met.

Oh yes Mr Carter, we know so much about him. We have him all carefully anatomised and tabulated, we know where he killed and how his mind worked, we know what he should or would have done, we know what he should have to done to Nichols given what he later did do to Eddowes.

Lovely Ripperology...

[Monty]

Mr Flower....

....Oh I like him.

I like him a lot.

Monty

[Errata]

Further, you use CAPITALISATION to insist on our discounting the possibility that the Stride murder was interrupted. Why? Unless she was unlucky enough to be attacked twice in the same location on the same night, then we know that an assault on the woman was witnessed, and that the man beginning the assault knew he was seen. So the idea that this was a Ripper killing that was interrupted isn't 'mere' supposition. It's an educated guess, it's at least as likely as any of yours

Okay, this I don't understand. According to you the man beginning the assault knew he was seen, so the whole Schwartz scenario is then true. But that would mean that she was attacked, left still alive and perfectly mobile while they chased Schwartz away, came back to her where she waited for them for some odd reason, and then they killed her, when someone else interrupted him and he ran off again, this time after slashing her throat. Which clearly makes no sense, so maybe you could clarify?

[lynn cates]

Boing.

Hello Errata. You must be an archer--you hit the bull's eye.

Cheers.
LC

[Henry Flower]

Well, listen - discard that point. It's a distraction. The point was - whatever the precise sequence of events concerning Stride and witnesses - it's slightly illogical of Phil to INSIST that we discount the possibility of the killer having been disturbed during the Stride attack in order that he might then insist it's not the work of the same killer.

And even if we DO discount Stride (I'm undecided) we're still left with Mr Carter insisting that the killer who cut two women's throats and attacked their abdomens in two very different ways must clearly be a different killer than the one who, weeks later in the very same neighbourhood, cut two more women's throats and attacked their abdomens in, again, very different ways.

Enjoy your bullseye. I'm addressing the absurdity (as I see it) of Phil Carter's central premise here.

[DVV]

Hi Henry Flower

Well, listen - discard that point. It's a distraction.

Schwartz could well have caused him to hurry, why not ? Diemshitz seems the more likely reason, but who knows ?

And even if we DO discount Stride (I'm undecided)

Having read your excellent posts, I'm surprised. If there is one thing clear in the case, it's really that Stride and Eddowes are the work of the same hand.

[Errata]

Well, listen - discard that point. It's a distraction. The point was - whatever the precise sequence of events concerning Stride and witnesses - it's slightly illogical of Phil to INSIST that we discount the possibility of the killer having been disturbed during the Stride attack in order that he might then insist it's not the work of the same killer.

And even if we DO discount Stride (I'm undecided) we're still left with Mr Carter insisting that the killer who cut two women's throats and attacked their abdomens in two very different ways must clearly be a different killer than the one who, weeks later in the very same neighbourhood, cut two more women's throats and attacked their abdomens in, again, very different ways.

Enjoy your bullseye. I'm addressing the absurdity (as I see it) of Phil Carter's central premise here.

Well, yeah but the whole thing is a bit of absurdity isn't it? I mean, Chapman and Eddowes go together for the successful extrication of a uterus. Nichols and Eddowes have their throats cut the same way, Stride and Kelly a different way, and Chapman a third way. Nichols and Stride were almost literally in the street, where Chapman and Eddowes were in relatively closed areas, Kelly of course being indoors. And of all of them that were mutilated, only Kelly is covered to some extent, and also the only one not mutilated through her clothes. And that's just to start.

Mr. Carter is certainly not out of his mind for seeing more than one hand at work here, and quite frankly, the only reason Stride even matters in any of these discussions is whether or not an aborted mutilation sent Jack running for Eddowes. Had she been killed the exact same way 6 months earlier, she would have blended into the nebulous background of a whole bunch of other women why had their throat cut, no matter who had killed her.

Anyone can break up the C5 in any number of ways that makes sense. I may not agree with that particular grouping, but I see the sense in it. But I'm not sure I've heard a successful argument yet for keeping them together as a single group.

It seems that there are two vitally important things to remember with this case. 1: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. 2: But that doesn't mean it's in fact a duck.

[Henry Flower]

Well there we agree: if it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck it's more likely to be a duck than three pigeons imitating a duck.