A Possible Reason Why Jack Didn't Mutilate Liz

I see Jack this way cd......he's like a closet serial masturbator.

Would a closet serial masturbator even begin his self indulgence if he was be fairly sure he could not complete the act based on his available privacy?

My guess is no.

Best regards

[c.d.]

Sorry, I mean to say the desire to mutilate instead of kill in the last sentence of my previous post.

c.d.

Hi Michael,

If you have read the most recent posts, you will see that they tend to focus on the question of whether Jack exhibited a rational fear of being caught that overrode his desire to continue mutilating or begin mutilating[/B]. That is the basic question here. If you answer no and believe that Jack would have mutilated Liz come hell or high water then the only possible conclusion that you can arrive at is that Jack was not her killer.

If, on the other hand, your answer is yes and you believe that fear of being caught and hanged would override his desire to mutilate then the question becomes is there something that might have caused Jack to fear for his safety. Let's call that an interruption whatever form it might have taken.

Now we have to ask is there something to indicate that Jack was interrupted. Certainly finding Liz with her clothes pulled up would indicate that or some sort of ripping cut however small on her body would lead us to believe that there was some sort of interruption. But what if the interruption occurred before he started to mutilate her? Hearing a door open perhaps or a change in the level of singing? There would be no evidence of that. Yet those remain distinct possibilities as well as just basic paranoia that perhaps he was pushing his luck. Paranoia (if indeed that was the case) would be in the mind of Jack and would leave no trace.

So if you believe that fear of being caught trumped the desire to kill, then the possibilty of Jack being interrupted has to factor into the equation regardless of whether there is actual evidence of it or not.

c.d.

I had seen the trending but wanted to balance some earlier points cd.

This is a fairly easy question for me based on my beliefs regarding the essential evidence that makes a Ripper kill....if he was interrupted in Bucks Row and corrected that situation by choosing a backyard for his second kill,...while changing virtually nothing about his "ritual" in both murders, I would fully expect that the next murder in his sequence would have the privacy requisite for him to fulfill his desires and show evidence that the "ritual" is still being followed.

Kate Eddowes murder does have those facets.

The absence of JtR's ritual in the case of Liz Stride is for me enough to set her aside.

I cannot for the life of me imagine that a man who killed and slit a woman open in public on a street would then be scared off by a noise while alone with the victim in the dark, and I cannot imagine the killer initiating his ritual desires unless he was fairly sure he could reach his true objectives....which were post mortem.

So I dont see the location as being very Jack friendly, and I dont see this man being skittish.

Cheers cd

[c.d.]

Hi Michael,

If you have read the most recent posts, you will see that they tend to focus on the question of whether Jack exhibited a rational fear of being caught that overrode his desire to continue mutilating or begin mutilating. That is the basic question here. If you answer no and believe that Jack would have mutilated Liz come hell or high water then the only possible conclusion that you can arrive at is that Jack was not her killer.

If, on the other hand, your answer is yes and you believe that fear of being caught and hanged would override his desire to mutilate then the question becomes is there something that might have caused Jack to fear for his safety. Let's call that an interruption whatever form it might have taken.

Now we have to ask is there something to indicate that Jack was interrupted. Certainly finding Liz with her clothes pulled up would indicate that or some sort of ripping cut however small on her body would lead us to believe that there was some sort of interruption. But what if the interruption occurred before he started to mutilate her? Hearing a door open perhaps or a change in the level of singing? There would be no evidence of that. Yet those remain distinct possibilities as well as just basic paranoia that perhaps he was pushing his luck. Paranoia (if indeed that was the case) would be in the mind of Jack and would leave no trace.

So if you believe that fear of being caught trumped the desire to kill, then the possibilty of Jack being interrupted has to factor into the equation regardless of whether there is actual evidence of it or not.

c.d.

A bit earlier there was some discussion about rituals, and in the case of some of the Ripper murders, there appears to be an almost ritualistic approach to achieving his objectives.

Needless to say I emphasized "some" because the ritual is not present in the murder of Liz Stride....or from what the evidence suggests, in the case of Mary Jane.

The sequence of Acquire outdoors while victim is soliciting-Direct or follow to dark location-Apply non lethal force to subdue-Inflict Lethal wound-Mutilate abdomen.... is how he begins the alleged series, and his second murder follows that same "ritualistic" approach. It is also present in the data regarding Kate Eddowes murder. That cant be said in the case of Liz Stride though......beginning with the assumption that he meets her while she is agreeable to going into an alley with a stranger.

The variations that are present in the final part of the ritual,... differing degrees of mutilations, removal of different organs,... can probably be considered as not being enough to discount an invitation into the Canonical Group, but the omission of the culmination of the act seems to me to indicate a different motivator or objective.

If in the opinion of the medical experts who reviewed the remains of Mary Ann and Annie.... (where it it is stated that they believed the act of murder was really to facilitate the actual objectives, which were to mutilate the womens abdomens and take organs from there)....... were correct in their assessment, then a murder like Liz Strides could only be added to the list reasonably if there are some indications that there was a final phase of the ritual planned.

She is untouched since the time she hit the ground, she is left on her side, and she has a single throat cut that may have been made while she fell. There isnt one bit of evidence that might suggest that what happened to her wasnt all that was intended. He killed her, plain and simple.

Jack killed so he had a motionless warm cadaver to cut into that would have little blood left in it to soil his clothing. Jack killed so he could cut.

Best regards all

[c.d.]

Hi Fish,

You didn't address the second part of my post. Wouldn't you expect anger and rage to produce a deep cut?

c.d.

[Fisherman]

C.d writes:

"The same question can be asked about whoever killed Liz. Why didn't he make a deeper cut to ensure that she didn't live and completely eliminate the possibility that she could recover and possibly identify him?"

Not really, c.d. - for if we leave Jack out of the discussion, why would we suppose that the man who cut her was somebody with a nasty habit of carving away down to the spine in one almighty stroke? And why would we deduce that the man who cut her was actually determined to kill?

If we need Jack on the stage, we also need to explain why he left his habits behind on this particular day. If we exclude him, we open up for just about any sort of cutter of whom we know absolutely nothing.

The best,
Fisherman

[Sam Flynn]

How much practice could he have had if he had only killed Polly and Annie?

As I see it, CD, the salient point is the force with which he cut their throats - and subsequently those of Eddowes and Kelly - not the amount of practice he may have had.

[c.d.]

Hi Fisherman and Sam,

The same question can be asked about whoever killed Liz. Why didn't he make a deeper cut to ensure that she didn't live and completely eliminate the possibility that she could recover and possibly identify him?

As for the BS man or Kidney being the possible killer, isn't it naturally assumed that their motivation was anger? For the BS man, it is believed that the anger stemmed from being turned down by Liz. For Kidney, it would have been jealousy that fueled the rage. The BS man (assuming he was not Kidney and was indeed Liz's killer) was so enraged that he killed Liz after being seen by two witnesses.
You would think that both of them would have so much anger and rage that their knife cut would have damn near decapitated Liz. Yet, that didn't happen. Now that boys is a real puzzler.

c.d

c.d.

[Fisherman]

C.d:

"If I had to guess, I would say that he probably thought that he had killed her with that one cut."

But having showed very clearly in the four other cases that he favoured KNOWING that he had killed - why would he settle for guessing and hoping in Dutfields yard? And since there is every reason to believe that the deep throat-cutting came about as a means to silence and kill in order to allow for the eviscerations with no further sounds or moves coming from the victim - why not use that self same, thoroughly efficient and very quick method on Stride?

"As to why he didn't cut a second time, no one other than Jack can answer that."

I have a feeling that Jack would have had no idea - since he was never there in the first place...!

The best,
Fisherman

[c.d.]

Hi Sam,

How much practice could he have had if he had only killed Polly and Annie?

As to why he didn't cut a second time, no one other than Jack can answer that. If I had to guess, I would say that he probably thought that he had killed her with that one cut.

c.d.

[c.d.]

I was addressing that one to Sam, Fisherman simply reiterating what he had written. It is still open to debate.

c.d.

[Sam Flynn]

I have to say I really don't get your throat cut arguments. Jack wasn't operating in a controlled lab environment. I doubt if he was trying to win Serial Killer of the Year or even best throat cut.

If he was the same man who killed Nichols and Chapman, he had the same body mass and biceps, and would have been able - quite naturally and without a second thought - to exert at least the same pressure on the knife when he cut Stride's throat. To this extent, the way a knife is wielded is almost congruent with a footprint - a question of physics, more than just technique. Heck - he didn't even start Stride's wound with the same penetration as the two former (and subsequent) murders.

There are just too many variables that could easily account for the differences with the previous cuts.

Here's a variable you can't account for - why didn't he make bloody sure that she was dead, instead of leaving her to bleed to death only slowly - especially if he suspected that "help" might have been on its way in the form of Diemschutz and co? I mean, how much longer is it going to take him to slice her neck again, deeper this time? Two seconds, perhaps less.

I go back to my Tiger Woods example. Sometimes he hits bad shots but he is still Tiger Woods.

The difference is that, unlike Tiger Woods, Liz's killer would have had ample opportunity to take another "shot", to make sure he'd finished her off. But he didn't. I deduce from that that he wasn't a practised throat-cutting killer.

[Fisherman]

C.d. states:

"In every single instance where Jack kills on the street, he flees the scene before completing what he wanted to do."

I thought we were discussing this, c.d; not that it was already a done deal. It is not, I assure you.

Look at things this way: He never went back on anything. Once he had cut Tabram in the stomach (if that was him), he kept doing it. Once he had opened Nichols up and cut her neck, he kept at it. Once he had procured organs from Chapman, he kept doing so. Once he had cut Eddowes face, he kept cutting faces. Once he had ...

Not once does he go back. But you obviously argue that in each case, he was afforded that specific stretch of time that allowed him to do just a bit more. Then, in each case, he was subsequently interrupted! And in each case, this happened a bit further down the line, mutilationwise.

Now, would it not be an almighty coincidence if things went down like this, in a clockwork fashion, more or less? Why were the victims not mixed up, so that he was allowed "an Eddowes" on Tabram, "a Nichols" on Chapman, "a Chapman" on Stride, but merely "a Tabram" on Kelly? Where does this relentless, fascinating, slowly yelding time allowance come from?

If we look upon things the other way, and accept that he evolved as a killer as he went along, the increasing damages surrounding the timeline of victims suddenly gets a logical explanation. And logical explanations are not to be easily discarded, c.d!

The best,
Fisherman

[c.d.]

You're right, Fisherman. I am assuming that Jack left the scene of the crimes because he did not want to get caught. It is an assumption but for me it is an easy one to accept. Everybody will have their own view of it.

c.d.