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Hello, Abby.
You're missing the point that I made. There was a certain skill involved with at least three of the canonical five, our man was proficient with a blade and knew how to dispatch his victims and what he was aiming for. Read Errata's recent post on how difficult it actually is to cut someone's throat, nevermind to the point of near decapitation.
That's one reason why people, mistakenly in my book, choose to add Tabram to the list, because they don't buy that the Ripper could kill in this manner without some kind of practice victim. The only problem is that Tabram's murder was only three weeks before Nichols and doesn't show a 'progression' in technique that one could identify with the other victims. If, say, Tabram had a shallow cut to the throat, then that would certainly add some credibility to the idea, but then you're still left with the frenzied stabbings to the body and none of the deliberate mutilations exhibited by the Ripper in the later killings. That's why I'm saying that the Ripper already had enough crude knowledge of slaughter and cutting things up that he could cleanly murder Nichols without shoehorning some 'trial run' into the mix.
For me, Tabram was in all likelihood murdered by a soldier (who wasn't the Ripper). It tallies up with her movements that night, we have two murder weapons (one of which believed to be a bayonet), and the furious nature of the stabbings indicate a different kind of motive and method to the one soon to be characteristic of the Ripper.
Btw, do we know that Tabram was strangled? I like the idea that she was knocked unconscious and I'm led to believe the post-mortem evidence supports this. Strangulation wouldn't necessarily prove anything anyway, as it's a pretty common method of killing someone.
You're missing the point that I made. There was a certain skill involved with at least three of the canonical five, our man was proficient with a blade and knew how to dispatch his victims and what he was aiming for. Read Errata's recent post on how difficult it actually is to cut someone's throat, nevermind to the point of near decapitation.
That's one reason why people, mistakenly in my book, choose to add Tabram to the list, because they don't buy that the Ripper could kill in this manner without some kind of practice victim. The only problem is that Tabram's murder was only three weeks before Nichols and doesn't show a 'progression' in technique that one could identify with the other victims. If, say, Tabram had a shallow cut to the throat, then that would certainly add some credibility to the idea, but then you're still left with the frenzied stabbings to the body and none of the deliberate mutilations exhibited by the Ripper in the later killings. That's why I'm saying that the Ripper already had enough crude knowledge of slaughter and cutting things up that he could cleanly murder Nichols without shoehorning some 'trial run' into the mix.
For me, Tabram was in all likelihood murdered by a soldier (who wasn't the Ripper). It tallies up with her movements that night, we have two murder weapons (one of which believed to be a bayonet), and the furious nature of the stabbings indicate a different kind of motive and method to the one soon to be characteristic of the Ripper.
Btw, do we know that Tabram was strangled? I like the idea that she was knocked unconscious and I'm led to believe the post-mortem evidence supports this. Strangulation wouldn't necessarily prove anything anyway, as it's a pretty common method of killing someone.
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