A Possible Reason Why Jack Didn't Mutilate Liz

[caz]

In this case, the premise of the thought experiment is hardly controversial. It's simply this: "Imagine for a moment that Eddowes was not killed on the same night. What effect would that have on our perceptions of the Stride murder?"

We all know that it didn't happen, but that's not the point. The point is whether Stride's murder would be on our "probables" list if we viewed her murder in isolation - which is all the thought experiment asks us to do. That's fair enough, surely?

Morning Sam,

Not controversial, no. Thought experiments may be fair enough, but the ‘point’ in this case is just a bit - well - pointless.

Of course we would view things differently if things were different: if Liz and Kate were killed on different nights, as in your own example; or if nobody had written in claiming to ‘want to get to work right away if I get a chance’ and the fiend had become known as Sam the Slasher .

Or to take it to its logical conclusion, if only Martha, Polly, Annie, Kate and Mary had not been murdered at all, what effect would that have on our perceptions of the Stride murder as the possible work of an active serial mutilator?

T’would be a ridiculous thought experiment but I really don’t see the difference. We are stuck with the few facts we have, and the two murders on the one night do make perfect sense of one another if the same man was responsible but simply failed to get the first woman from their point of encounter to a suitable ripping spot.

I must say, this equation looks fine to me as it is and it doesn’t require the addition of a second unknown killer, with another unknown motive, or a single coincidence in order to solve it. The strain of your argument is really showing if you have to take away the murder that proves the ripper was active that night to improve the cut of your jib. You won’t catch me going for cosmetic surgery.

The guy who kills Liz obviously wasnt troubled by Schwartz's potential ID of him later. Why? Because he wasnt a criminal mastermind or likely a double murderer...he was a drunk thug.

Hi Perry,

What, so the guy who kills Kate wasn’t likely a double murderer because he obviously wasn’t troubled by Lawende and co potentially identifying him later?

And who is saying anything about a ‘criminal mastermind’, apart from you?

Love,

Caz
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[Sam Flynn]

A prostitute in Whitechapel with her throat cut? Yes, I think that would be on the probable list.

Deeply cut throat and guts ripped open, CD... them's the clinchers for me. Beyond which - in all objectivity - it's the "possible" list at best, I'm afraid.

Call it what you like....ritual, habit, ordered behavior....but there is little doubt that the killer of Polly, Annie and perhaps Kate followed a process....one that was seemingly consistent.

Consider that as part of Liz's murderers process, he may have cut her throat while she was falling. At least Blackwell thought and said so. If the Rippers victims were not cut until they were on the ground unconscious, why should this death not clearly be following the same pattern?

Oh....and the fact that this victim has a witnessed assault on her person feet from, and minutes before her death, and was not clearly soliciting...as we know Polly and Annie were... should be factored as well.

Somebody sees a man assault Liz....since he is the only person on the street by the gates in addition to Liz, and the yard was stated by witnesses to be empty by 12:40...this man was likely her killer....and if you like Jack for this, him also. There are no other people around....just him and her outside an empty yard.

So...a man sees him assault a soon to be victim, the man yells at him.....then, if Jack, he takes Liz inside the yard to kill her.

Reasonably....logically, does at least a double murderer to that point kill her just after being seen by a witness assaulting her?

My answer would be when hell freezes over. The guy who kills Liz obviously wasnt troubled by Schwartz's potential ID of him later. Why? Because he wasnt a criminal mastermind or likely a double murderer...he was a drunk thug.

Cheers

[Mort Belfry]

But what if Jack had some sort of ritual that he followed before beginning to cut? Something that was extremely important to him and something from which he would not deviate.

I have to say I doubt it. As sickening as it sounds I try to think of a serial murder as a form of masturbation with the signature part of the killings, in this case the evisceration, as the climax.

Even if you have your little rituals, you're not going to put them ahead of the wank itself. So if you're scared about "mum coming home" getting it over with is the most important thing.

Especially if you only do it four or five times in your life.


That said, in light of what we learned about Peter Sutcliffe after he was arrested, the only ritual I can think of that might slow up Jack would be masturbation itself.

[c.d.]

A prostitute in Whitechapel with her throat cut? Yes, I think that would be on the probable list.

c.d.

[Sam Flynn]

There's everything wrong with a hypothetical situation we know didn't happen in this case.

No there isn't, Caz, not when the premise and purpose of the "thought experiment" is clearly defined - which I thought I'd already done.

Science is full of such devices, and they work perfectly well. You know the sort of thing: "Imagine a box of gas of volume V, with N molecules at a temperature T... Now imagine that we take away one of the walls of the box...". You don't need the box to be physically there, or the actual removal of one of the walls to have occurred, to be enabled to examine the possibilities.

In this case, the premise of the thought experiment is hardly controversial. It's simply this: "Imagine for a moment that Eddowes was not killed on the same night. What effect would that have on our perceptions of the Stride murder?"

We all know that it didn't happen, but that's not the point. The point is whether Stride's murder would be on our "probables" list if we viewed her murder in isolation - which is all the thought experiment asks us to do. That's fair enough, surely?

[sdreid]

Perhaps it's been mentioned previously but I wondered if he might have been temporarily incapacitated by something like a gouge to the eye.

[caz]

Hi Sam,

There's everything wrong with a hypothetical situation we know didn't happen in this case. The ripper (whether he killed Liz or not) wasn't tucked up in bed by 1.30; he was polishing off Kate and grabbing a handful of bodily souvenirs.

Also, you seem to want to focus only on the level of mutilation for some reason, when of equal relevance here are factors like timing, location and risk - quite apart from the fact that the ripper chose this very night to kill again, three weeks after the last.

Was he in a rush to find a victim and get stuck in early this time, when previously he had still been out on the prowl much later? If so, it couldn't have had anything to do with an even earlier murder he knew nothing about, and if he knew about it but hadn't committed it himself, it was arguably the worst night to pick for his next job.

Love,

Caz
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[caz]

That's too easy, c.d.

People will just say Liz's killer was not necessarily interrupted.

What I would liken it to is our Ted, finding Liz alone outside a busy club and wanting to drive her somewhere they were unlikely to be interrupted, and her not playing ball, getting suspicious of his real motives and looking like she might start causing a fuss. Ted quickly finishes her off so he won't have to worry about what she's doing or who she's talking to while he's off finding himself another victim he can really go to town on.

Rape or bodily pillage, he'd have found someone else that night to take it out on, if he'd had to roam the area until dawn.

Nature of the beast.

Love,

Caz
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[Sam Flynn]

Hi Sam,

I prefer not to dwell on purely hypothetical situations

I'm not dwelling on it, Caz. Just making an observation that it's undoubtedly her affiliation with the Double Event that makes Liz a "canonical" victim - and very little else.

Besides, there's nowt wrong with hypothetical situations - it was on the basis of such "thought experiments" that Einstein was able to probe the mysteries of relativity. That'll do for me

I rarely see you clutching at straws, Sam, so I didn't expect to see such an odd "Triple Event" non sequitor from you.

Neither a non-sequitur, nor an exercise in straw-clutching, Caz. You raised the idea that the carnage perpetrated on Catherine Eddowes might have been precipitated by the Ripper's frustration at not being able to finish the job on Stride. I'm happy to roll with that for the sake of argument, but if the level of mutilation were predicated on thwarted ambition, who were the Stride equivalents in the case of Nichols and Chapman? Weren't they - at least Chapman - sufficiently savaged to warrant an hypothetical "hungry fox" scenario as well? If not (i.e. if their respective mutilations can be explained without their being at the frustrated end of their own "Double Events"), why should we need to propose as much in the case of Eddowes?

Perhaps it was unfortunate that I chose the (indoor) murder of Kelly to posit a frustrated "Triple Event", but the principle's broadly the same.

[c.d.]

Hi Caz, Sam,

What if we were to substitute rape for murder? Imagine a serial rapist getting a woman's clothes down and himself ready to penetrate her when he is interrupted and has to run off. Is it unreasonable to think that he would quickly look for another victim so that the act could be completed?

c.d.

[caz]

Hi Sam,

I prefer not to dwell on purely hypothetical situations, or hypothetical 'patterns' of behaviour (when dealing with such tiny numbers - as you are usually so quick to point out ), especially when the phenomena of frustration-based double events and extreme single events are so well documented that no other explanation fits quite as well with all the circumstances of the three Whitechapel murders in question.

I wish I could, but I can't go back in time and erase from my mind the two separate, and quite horrible Croydon double events in recent years, any more than I could wipe out Ted Bundy's, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Bundy

In Murray, Utah, on November 8, 1974, Carol DaRonch narrowly escaped with her life. Claiming to be Officer Roseland of the Murray Police Department, Bundy approached her at the Fashion Place Mall, told her someone had tried to break into her car, and asked her to accompany him to the police station. She got into his car but refused his instruction to buckle her seat belt. They drove for a short period before Bundy suddenly pulled to the shoulder and attempted to slap a pair of handcuffs on her. In the struggle, he fastened both loops to the same wrist. Bundy whipped out his crowbar, but DaRonch caught it in the air just before it would have cracked her skull. She then got the door open and tumbled out onto the highway, thus escaping from her would-be killer.

About an hour later, a strange man showed up at Viewmont High School in Bountiful, Utah, where the drama club was putting on a play. He approached the drama teacher and then a student, asking both to come out to the parking lot to identify a car. Both declined. The drama teacher saw him again shortly before the end of the play, this time breathing hard, with his hair mussed and his shirt untucked. Another student saw the man lurking in the rear of the auditorium. Debby Kent, a 17-year-old Viewmont High student, left the play at intermission to go and pick up her brother, and was never seen again. Later, investigators found a small key in the parking lot outside Viewmont High. It unlocked the handcuffs taken off Carol DaRonch.

Over the next few months Bundy managed to pull off at least five more single events.

I rarely see you clutching at straws, Sam, so I didn't expect to see such an odd "Triple Event" non sequitor from you.

The indoor Kelly carnage, more than a month after the ripper's Mitre Square excesses, is rather easily explained in other ways, as well you know.

Love,

Caz
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[Sam Flynn]

I know that. And what I am trying to get across is basic cause and effect

Understood, Caz - but that's irrelevant to the hypothetical situation that I was discussing, whereby Eddowes doesn't get killed on the same evening as Stride, which would almost certainly have put the latter on everybody's "maybe" list.

and the very real possibility that it was Liz's failure to support the ripper's cause that had an almost immediate effect on Kate's fate. It's exactly what would have been expected from a hungry fox who'd just had to leave a chicken dead but not even tasted.

On which basis, where are the missing two-thirds of the "Triple Event" that preceded the Kelly carnage?

[caz]

...the Ripper gives me the impression of someone who knew when the iron was hot enough to strike. When he did, the least he seems to have been able to do is to sever the throat to an appreciable depth and to at least begin to slash open the abdomen - neither of which happened at Berner Street...

Hi Sam,

But that would be explained quite easily if he never intended to mutilate anyone in Berner Street, but was assuming Liz would be desperate enough to accompany him, just like his previous 'conquests', from the point of encounter to a suitable ripping place, away from the eyes of any pesky witnesses or club goers etc. We don't know how much a refusal might have offended, or how well it would have ended for a less than 'grateful' unfortunate. "I'll teach the likes of her to turn down the likes of me".

I was merely suggesting that, IF Eddowes hadn't been killed that night, we'd be talking about a "C4" today, and that Stride would be bundled with Coles and others in the category of "maybe, but probably not a Ripper victim".

I know that. And what I am trying to get across is basic cause and effect, and the very real possibility that it was Liz's failure to support the ripper's cause that had an almost immediate effect on Kate's fate. It's exactly what would have been expected from a hungry fox who'd just had to leave a chicken dead but not even tasted.

Love,

Caz
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[Sam Flynn]

Hi CD,

Well, he didn't go "all the way" with Nichols, and may have been interrupted there for all we know. However, the Ripper still made a God-awful mess of Polly, not to mention the fact that he sliced her neck to an appreciable depth before getting started on the rest - something that cannot be claimed in respect of Stride.