A Modern Day BS Man/Liz Encounter

[Robert]

I've thought of eating haggis, but I don't have the stomach for it.

[lynn cates]

ingredior

Hello Robert. Say, you're really feeling your oats today!

Cheers.
LC

[caz]

Hi All,

Simon said, in response to my little scenario in post #219:

Hi Caz,

Wow! That is simple rather than complex?

Might I suggest you turn your not inconsiderable writing talents to bodice-ripping fiction.

Well Simon, I might have found that insulting - if I were not Caz and you were not Simon Wood.

As it is, I have even less of a desire to write romantic fiction than to read it, and although I love comedy in general I find sticking pins in my eyes marginally less painful than watching ‘Romcom’.

I would define bodice-ripping fiction as the unlikely love triangle we have seen described involving Liz falling head over heels for a rudely inattentive new beau who keeps her waiting so long outside the club that her ex finds her there first and slashes her pretty neck in a rit of fealous jage. It may be rubbish, but it beats the holy crap out of requiring a political conspiracy theory to explain why this toothless formerly registered prostitute had to die at that spot, and die horribly, smack in the middle of a series of prostitute murders, infamous for their brutality and pointlessness. Even Clouseau would have drawn the line somewhere between these two beauties - the ridiculous and the sublimely ridiculous.

So, Caz, do you suscribe to 2 different killers running around in Whitechapel on Sept. 30?

Hi Maria,

I don't consider it utterly impossible, despite everything we know and have been able to learn from documented double-eventing serial killers. But on balance I'll eat my hat and find it easier to swallow if two independent killers were really out cutting these two female throats on a single night for no good reason.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

...your scenario has a couple of problems that I see. One, why didn't she scream much louder and appeal to Schwartz and the Pipe Man for help? Surely, in your scenario she has to realize she is in serious danger at that point.

Two, well its those damn cachous again. They would have to remain unbroken after being thrown to the ground and most likely dragged to where she was killed. Seems unlikely.

Plus it all seems so un-Jack like. Although I took a number of acting classes and whenever a student would say "I just don't think my character would do that", the teacher would go nuts and say "how the hell do you know what your character would or would not do?"

Hi c.d.,

My scenario takes account of the fact that Liz went out with only sixpence to her name; no evidence that she got drunk; acquired a flower at some point; and had no money on her when found with a single fatal throat wound.

Like every other woman at the time, she had to be conscious that three local women in a similar state of poverty had been foully murdered in recent weeks while out and about after dark. But there is a huge difference between exercising more caution than usual about going off alone with just anyone, and screaming blue murder the instant any man starts behaving badly in your presence - especially one who, in my scenario, had been pleasant enough company earlier the same evening and was now just throwing his Saturday night weight about a bit, and in front of witnesses.

If BS man was so un-Jack like, would Liz really have screamed in genuine fear of her life, with the absolute conviction that this man was the Whitechapel fiend, intent on ripping her to pieces? It wasn’t as if they were alone at that point, with him brandishing a sharp knife at her and grinning maniacally. Was it not more likely that she would react initially with surprise and indignation to a bit of unexpected pulling and shoving? Or were there women like Liz all over Whitechapel, expecting the worst at the first sign of male aggression?

Re those blasted cachous, remember my scenario has BS man backing off and appearing to go on his way after the witnesses take their own leave. Liz ducks inside the passage and feels reassured that it was no worse. That’s when she may have felt like a cachou, to suck on while considering her options for the rest of the night. Did she still have her sixpence at that point? If so, what happened to it? If she had spent it all, where was she going to sleep? Did BS man creep back when there was nobody around to see him, and catch her unawares, still fuming about her unwillingness to go somewhere alone with him? Or was he a normal bloke who went off with his hurt pride, leaving the field clear for a smoother operator to hurt Stride?

Love,

Caz
X

[c.d.]

Hi Caz,

The BS man returning scenario doesn't work for me because you would think in the interim that he would have realized that he had been seen by Schwartz and the Pipe Man. Now it is certainly possible that he was so enraged that he didn't give a damn. But if he was that enraged how did Liz miss it and not scream for help?

...and round and round we go....unidentified mysterious lovers....conspiracies from Schwartz and the club. As you said, the idea of two independent killers out that night slashing throats is hard to accept.

c.d.

[caz]

Hello Caz.

"Do you have in mind for the murderer someone who secretly wanted the club shut down . . ."

Secretly? Don't think so.

Okay Lynn, someone who openly wanted the club shut down then, and happened to come across Liz there, where he secretly murdered her on the spot in an attempt to achieve that goal?

" . . . while the sincere members who feared the club would be shut down went into damage limitation mode by putting the unknown murderer's clock forward to 1am . . ."

No, no. They needed a quick cover story. The few minutes (10?) made up the gap. ("When did you discover the body?" "12:40, sir." "'Ere now, and you waited almost till bleedin' one o'clock to go for us coppers?")

Er yes, I did understand you correctly then. In my book the need to go into ‘damage limitation mode’ would equate to the need for a ‘quick cover story’. Hence the need for breathing space to decide what to do, and the need to move the discovery of the body forward to when they had decided, so the delay in alerting the authorities would not be apparent.

All well and good, but then you go and spoil it all with this:

Caz, suppose that Ripperologists were considered crazy and you are a known one of them. Suppose further that you knew that you were being watched at times by the police.

Was your secret murderer unaware that the club and its members were being watched at times by the coppers? Were the members who knew the body was already making their premises untidy at 12.40 aware that the police watched them at times, when hatching their little time-shifting plot and later inducing Schwartz to have “been” there when he wasn’t, and to have “seen” someone who wasn’t there either?

" . . .and calling on the acting services of Schwartz to get the charm wound up?"

Charm? No. They needed an actor to "see" someone who--whatever else he was--was no club member attacking Liz.

I meant charm in the Scottish Play’s weird sisters sense. So again, I did understand you correctly. They needed Schwartz to complete the magic spell by conjuring up a murdering, “Lipski”-spitting Gentile genie.

Hello Caz. Of course I can't rule your scenario out--not even if I fully understood it. But I would wonder:

1. How is the bloke saving money by buying a flower rather than just throwing down 4d?

2. Is this the "simpler" version?

3. Much seems to depend on fear on the street over Leather Apron. But isn't this 3 weeks later?

4. Why are we sure it was "Jack" at Mitre square?

1. He would be buying the flower while feeling positive about his ability to wear Liz down and get her alone. No point in throwing good money after bad, and throwing down 4d wasn’t going to do the trick once Liz had finally come clean and confessed that she wasn’t going to come round, flower or no flower, and wasn’t ‘for sale’ at any price - at least not that night, and not to him.

2. At least it’s about real life, the human condition and immediate needs, desires and reactions - not always simple, by a long chalk, but “simpler” than the alternatives, whether it’s a woman in Liz’s position making plans for a brighter tomorrow when stuck in the rut of today’s hand-to-mouth existence, or a one-off secret killer with a political agenda that was an open secret, who found a suitable case for treatment right on the right doorstep at the right time for his purposes.

3. Three weeks is no time at all - hardly long enough to forget, by the end of September, that three women in similar circumstances had now met with extraordinary ends (even for the area) since early the previous month. The fear over the Yorkshire Ripper kept women constantly cautious for years, even with many months between appearances, yet still not cautious enough to stay off the streets at night and deprive him of opportunities to claim more lives right up until he was caught with another potential victim.

4. I don’t know why ‘we’ are sure. You must have some idea of why you are sure, or not sure. (I’ll never forget a very strange little girl in my class at primary school - no, not me - who was asked one day if she was sure about something, and her reply was: “How can I be sure when I haven’t got a sure to be sure with?” I bet she was a genius in the making.) I can only speak for myself and I'm rarely sure about anything. But I’d be a bit staggered to find a second organ-removing mutilator operating independently of Annie’s, and as blissfully unaware that the Dear Boss author was relying on one of the buggers coming out to play just as this one did. As Harry Hill would say: “What are the chances of that happening?”

It's like one of those little weather houses, with one figure popping out just as the other pops back in. Which one did for Mary Kelly? Or is this your wild card - a third organ-removing mutilator, popping out when the other two had moved to Dunripping and Killnomoor? Has anything remotely like it happened before or since? If not, and if there is no evidence that it happened this time, I feel bound by the laws of physics, sanity and insanity, to stick with the one organ-harvesting mutilator for now.

Is this for real, Lynn, or are you winding us up? It’s looking more and more like something that our dear old fiend Crystal would have been proud to conjure up, just to see how we dance.

If I've been posting all this for your amusement my leg-pulling nose must have been temporarily blocked up. Anyone got a red hanky they can lend me?

Love,

Caz
X

[Scott Nelson]

Caz!

The bird is the word!!!

[caz]

Last one for today... one I prepared earlier.

I do find it strange that for all the sympathy and interest shown towards the victims and their grim lives and deaths, so little allowance is made for them having distinct personalities, and behaving in different ways, that would influence the killer’s own behaviour differently on each occasion, determining what he could achieve and even his mood while trying to achieve it. There were no guarantees that each prospective victim would give him the chance to use the exact same method on her, or that he would be able to retain this alleged cool of his, no matter what.

Martha: good evidence that her killer could well have gone from congenial or ice cool to the red mist stage in an instant, with nobody around to witness it.

Polly, Annie and Kate: no evidence that their killer had any reason to lose his temper before slicing their throats, but we don’t get to see their last seconds of life, not a single switch from presumed harmless to positively lethal, with sharp knife against flesh. So we don’t know what effected the change in each case.

Assuming Polly saw in her killer a fourth source of doss tokens; Annie was too weak and sick to resist her murderer; and Kate meekly went with hers to a pitch-dark corner of Mitre Sq, there would have been no need for anyone to lose their cool with any of these women, much less in front of witnesses. But again, we have no idea what fired their killer up to do the deed, or at what stage of the proceedings. Did he need to be pushed over the edge by something said or done by the woman herself? Or was he preparing to use the knife even before he had found a suitable throat for it?

MJK’s killer could have lost his temper with her in that room or kept his cool throughout - no witnesses to tell us which. So all in all, if Liz wasn’t soliciting for doss money, sick, hungry, drunk or asleep when her killer came across her outside that club, she may not have been quite the pushover he was hoping for. If her ex, or someone else who knew her, or just a casual passer-by, could be roused to anger by her behaviour with witnesses present, and even go on to cut her throat, I can’t understand why Jack is assumed to be above a similar show of anger. How would we expect Annie’s killer to have reacted if she had tried telling him to take a running jump, in front of Mrs Long?

The point being that, after 122 years, no serial killer has been found.

So that makes it more likely that what we actually have here is an extraordinary series of extraordinary male-on-female murders, each committed by a different individual with a different, but conventional motive, not one of whom has been found and connected to his female victim?

Or is there another alternative that looks more likely to bear fruit?

I thought the point was that serial killers with no known connections to their victims are ten times harder to pin down than one-off killers, making it fifty times less likely that we have five killers still to find rather than one or two at most.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Caz!

The bird is the word!!!

The b-b-bird, the bird is the word.

Most sensible post of the day prize goes to you, Scotty.

Love,

Caz
X

[mariab]

Hi Caz,
I can't compete with “The b-b-bird is the word“, but everything you said here makes very much sense to me.

[Fisherman]

Caz writes:

"...there is a huge difference between exercising more caution than usual about going off alone with just anyone, and screaming blue murder the instant any man starts behaving badly in your presence - especially one who, in my scenario, had been pleasant enough company earlier the same evening ..."

...meaning that you promote Marshalls´man and BS man as being one and the same? If so; bravo! It is a suggestion I share, as you know.

"I do find it strange that for all the sympathy and interest shown towards the victims and their grim lives and deaths, so little allowance is made for them having distinct personalities, and behaving in different ways, that would influence the killer’s own behaviour differently on each occasion"

Sound reasoning, of course, Caz. But turn the tables! Once we realize that Nichols, Chapman, Eddowes and Kelly must have been very different inbetween themselves, we may have anticipated that they would have met very different ends. But no - a cut deeply throat, followed by evisceration became the fate of them all!
Why - if they were all so different (which they must have been)?

Surely, the suggestion that our killer was very much intent on cutting throats deeply and eviscerating women becomes a tempting bid for an explanation!

And lets go on turning tables: If we must allow for a whole set of different possible approaches on behalf of Jack when it comes to dispatching his victims, then why is it that so many a poster suggests that BS man would not have been satisfied with just the one cut? Why must we accept that he logically must have slapped Stride about before he cut? Why must we accept that if it was a deed commited between aquintances, then there would have been a loud row?
These are not suggestions and demands made by you, Caz, I know that. But since you make a call for accepting variations in connection with a killer who in his canonically accepted deeds displayed VERY good reasons to recognize a man with fetiche signatures, I think it would be a very good time to point out that a "domestic" or "aquainted" killer may well need to be allowed a good deal more space than Jack when it comes to different approaches in his one-off killing...!

The best,
Fisherman

[mariab]

Caz wrote:
I do find it strange that for all the sympathy and interest shown towards the victims and their grim lives and deaths, so little allowance is made for them having distinct personalities, and behaving in different ways, that would influence the killer’s own behaviour differently on each occasion.
Fish, I think Caz meant little nuances in the occurrences, that might have slightly changed the beginning of the attack in every situation, NOT a different MO altogether. But I'm sure that Caz can speak for herself...

[Fisherman]

I think, Maria, that Caz´claim is altogether useful and rational. I would have expected no less, considering the source. But that does not change the fact that we may need to also allow for a good deal of freedom of choices when it comes to the behavior of a possible aquintance killer! That was the point I was pressing.

The best,
Fisherman

[mariab]

Sure, Fish, I understand. By the way I agree with most of the points you make in your very sensibly presented old dissertation on Stride's murder, but for myself I tend to see Stride's slaying as a Ripper act and not a domestic killing.

[lynn cates]

this, that, other

Hello Caz. Here we go . . .

"Okay Lynn, someone who openly wanted the club shut down then, and happened to come across Liz there, where he secretly murdered her on the spot in an attempt to achieve that goal?"

I thought you meant some private thing. No, I presume, in a most likely case scenario, the orchestrator to be an anarchist, cooperating with some European police agency (Swiss? German? Austrian? Russian?). Would he do it himself? Unlikely. One usually hires less bright underlings to do this work. (See Kaufmann's instigation of Stallmacher and Kammerer.)

"Was your secret murderer unaware that the club and its members were being watched at times by the coppers?"

Unclear. But I think he had visited the club before and knew a good deal of their routines.

"Were the members who knew the body was already making their premises untidy at 12.40 aware that the police watched them at times, . . . ?"

Quite possibly. In fact, after William Morris' article on police spies in "Commonweal" I don't know how they could have avoided knowing that they were watched most of the time. Did they gamble that no police spy was in the yard at the time? I cannot escape that conclusion. Of course, it was helpful that the yard was quite dark.

"So again, I did understand you correctly. They needed Schwartz to complete the magic spell by conjuring up a murdering, “Lipski”-spitting Gentile genie."

That's one way of putting it, but not my first choice. Schwartz merely added force to the argument. And yes, they gambled that no one would contradict him. And although Brown did precisely that (tacitly, at least) it seems not to have had fatal consequences.

"1. He would be buying the flower while feeling positive about his ability to wear Liz down and get her alone. No point in throwing good money after bad, and throwing down 4d wasn’t going to do the trick once Liz had finally come clean and confessed that she wasn’t going to come round, flower or no flower, and wasn’t ‘for sale’ at any price - at least not that night, and not to him."

Where did he buy this flower?

"2. At least it’s about real life, the human condition and immediate needs, desires and reactions - not always simple, by a long chalk, but “simpler” than the alternatives, whether it’s a woman in Liz’s position making plans for a brighter tomorrow when stuck in the rut of today’s hand-to-mouth existence, or a one-off secret killer with a political agenda that was an open secret, who found a suitable case for treatment right on the right doorstep at the right time for his purposes."

Ummm, found her? No no, she was to meet him at 12:30. It was a set up.

"3. Three weeks is no time at all - hardly long enough to forget, by the end of September, that three women in similar circumstances had now met with extraordinary ends (even for the area) since early the previous month. The fear over the Yorkshire Ripper kept women constantly cautious for years, even with many months between appearances, yet still not cautious enough to stay off the streets at night and deprive him of opportunities to claim more lives right up until he was caught with another potential victim."

Try trawling the London papers for 1888. Throat cuttings abounded. And the Yorkshire ripper? He wasn't invented yet.

"4. I don’t know why ‘we’ are sure. You must have some idea of why you are sure, or not sure.'

I like Baxter's summary at the Stride inquest--especially as regards Liz and Kate. He draws a stark contrast between them on the one hand and Polly and Annie on the other.

"I’d be a bit staggered to find a second organ-removing mutilator operating independently of Annie’s . . . “What are the chances of that happening?”"

Well, the chances go up exponentially if the second bloke were thinking, "Hmmm, now let's see. How did that go again? I am to cut how? Remove what?"

". . . [I]s this your wild card - a third organ-removing mutilator, popping out . . . ? Has anything remotely like it happened before or since?

Well Caz, think about Ripperological history. Time was that the "wisdom" on McKenzie and Coles was that it was domestic and the extraneous cuts were to give a certain appearance. Did we so much as wince at that? So why wince now by moving the time line back from '89 and '91 to late September 1888?

"Is this for real, Lynn, or are you winding us up?"

Oh, it's real alright. I have no remaining doubts that Jacob Isenschmid killed Polly and Annie.

"It’s looking more and more like something that our dear old fiend Crystal would have been proud to conjure up, just to see how we dance."

Er, Crystal? Sorry, I can't help you here.

Cheers.
LC