Mary Jane Kelly (Another) New Theory

[Ben]

Gh, gave a honest recollection of the colour description, according to what his eyes witnessed.

How do you know, Rich?

How do you know he didn't just borrow from Joseph Lawende's description of a red rag to make his own account seem more plausible? The latter, incidentally, is no less exempt from skepticism with regard to his alleged ability to distinguish colour from a distance, although he did proffer "reddish" and wasn't claiming to have noticed a myriad of other minor details at the same time.

Best regards,
Ben

[Graham]

Ben, Fisherman.

How long is this nonsense to continue? This was a very interesting thread until you two nerds conspired to wreck it.

Richard,

Take my advice and keep out of it, mate.

Graham

[Fisherman]

It seems, Graham, that you have not noticed that Ben and I have sorted things out by now.

Nerd, was it?

The best, Graham!

Fisherman

[richardnunweek]

Hi Ben.
It would be simply be so much easier, if we believed observations made at the time, would it not?
But that is obviously not the case. nor willl it be..
I have never found the Hutchinson saga a 'Big Deal' My convictions on that matter are well documented on all sites, and threads, since 1999.
Yes it has always been observed that GHS, statement was full of dubious wording that has led many of us to reject[ in modern times] the authenticity of it .Full Stop..
But taking a more rational approach, especially as I have had more insight [ so it appears] by hearing that illusive broadcast in the 70s, I will have to stick to my honest opinion that Ghs statement is a true assesment of his recollections of that fateful morning the 9th November 1888.
And untill disproven.
George William Topping , aged 22 years . born 1/10 1868, was Abberlines witness.
Regards Richard.

[Graham]

It seems, Graham, that you have not noticed that Ben and I have sorted things out by now.

Nerd, was it?

The best, Graham!

Fisherman

I hope so.

Graham

[Ben]

Hi Richard,

With respect, what you're advocating as the "more rational approach" is clearly nothing of the sort. By all means, stick to your beliefs if you wish, but it simply isn't the case that "untill disproven George William Topping , aged 22 years . born 1/10 1868, was Abberlines witness." It doesn't work like that at all. There are far more likely candidates for "Abberline's witness" out there than Toppy, whose candidacy, if not totally disproven, is incredibly unlikely.

Regards,
Ben

[brummie]

I have seen it on these boards that Joseph Fleming used at one time the alias James Evans. Could there be some connection with the porter James Evans who appears in the records of Whitechapple Infirmary as admitted for aprox. 1 month may 23 to june 27 1888 being of unsound mind, and again about a week later (this may well be the same James Evans although there are discrepancies in the admission records) being insane discharged 9th July.

[Ben]

Hi Brummie,

I considered that possibility a while back, but it turned out that the James Evans in question was 20 years old at the time, and thus 8 or 9 years younger than Fleming. I suppose, at a stretch, it could have been "our" Joe falsifying his age. Or perhaps Joe encountered this younger chap at some point and pinched his identity, as opposed to the "James Evans" alias being plucked from nowhere!

Best regards,
Ben

[brummie]

Maybe my tranciption of the records is wrong but although his second admittance in July is listed as age 20, the first occasion in May I have him listed as 28. Given that the records are sometimes difficult to read and therefore transcribe correctly I wondered if the first admittance is correct and the second has been misread, especially as there is also a discrepancy with the address.

[joelhall]

there would be light from windows, lamps, the moon, light pollution. it was not pitch black, and in dim light, colours are less pronounced they do not become black and white (did anyone else study optics & light in physics here?). i can tell colours in dim light, and if this was the norm, your eyes do adapt to light conditions (any other amateur astronomers here? youll know this).

as for gh i once entertained the thought that this was an alias given by joe fleming, which would explain his following kelly, the fact he gave her money, kept tabs on this bloke she was with, and only gave evidence after the inquest, so as not to run into barnett, and so on.

just a thought anyway.

joel

[caz]

If the Ripper murders happened today they would hardly fill a column and would most likely not even reach the international papers.

Hi Glenn,

You were joking here, right?

Just like another poster, I immediately thought of the Ipswich murders, to name but one series which similarly caught the public imagination. Some major differences here though, because the Ipswich killer was soon caught and the five victims, though murdered in quick succession compared with many other serial cases, did not feature anything like the ripper mutilations or organ removal, and he didn’t leave their bodies in situ in busy locations where they would be found almost immediately by the next poor sod who happened onto the scene. It was more like a missing persons case, where the bodies were found at a later date, concealed or dumped in remote locations. It remains a sensational case, however, because it is still incredibly rare, at least here in the UK, for a man to prey on women in this way and get away with enough repeat offences to earn the serial killer definition.

Hello Glenn,

Sorry to backtrack a bit, but I have just read your post. I don't disagree with your general statement about violence in a domestic context, but I'd like to differ about the Buck Ruxton case. There is no doubt that the murder of his common-law wife by Buck Ruxton on 15 September 1935 was a domestic crime. Even the motive, jealousy, is frequent in such crimes. But the extensive mutilations perfomed on Isabella Ruxton's body were not due to a desire to obliterate her features, extract revenge or appease anger. Ruxton, who was a surgeon, was trying to eliminate any physical traits that could facilitate the identification of Isabella's body and thus escape detection. He removed her eyes, lips, ears and nose, pulled off her teeth and scalped her. He cut off her fingertips and dismembered her. At the same time, he performed similar mutilations on the body of the couple's maid, Mary Rogerson. She had apparently walked in while her employer stood over his wife's body and, as he eventually admitted, he had to kill her too.

Crippen's murder of his wife Cora was also domestic and involved extensive mutilation of her body. Once again, the violence committed during the murder, which was carried with poison, was minimal. The dismemberment of the corpse was designed to facilitate its disposal.

Cheers
Hook

Hi Captain Hook,

Yes, I don’t know why Glenn keeps bringing up Buck, if he knows of scores of better examples where the victims of domestic murder were dehumanised and depersonalised after death for complex emotional reasons (which is his whole argument re MJK), rather than destroyed for the very practical one of self-preservation.

Obviously MJK’s killer did not mutilate her face beyond recognition to protect himself from being identified. If a known associate wanted rid of her for whatever personal reason, he would need to have been pretty unhinged and reckless at the time to do all that to her in her own room, regardless of whether a mutilating serial killer of prostitutes was active in the area at the time or not. In fact, he would actually have been bloody lucky not to be caught immediately, rightly identified as her killer and promptly fingered as Jack himself, since the police would have had bags more experience of clearing up domestic cases in the area than any other type of violent man-on-woman crime.

I can’t imagine that five street murders over the previous three months had so altered the mindset formed by many decades of policing that everyone had clean forgotten by November 1888 how brutal the ordinary men in the street could be to their womenfolk. That mindset was very much to the fore when Joe Barnett was examined and questioned. If he did it, he didn't come across as unhinged or reckless the following day. Nor did he appear to have something akin to an elephant in a very small room to hide from the cops.

Perhaps Mary's killer was a criminal genius and the cops were all fools. The irony is that he wouldn't have to be a genius at all and the cops wouldn't have to be fools if the ripper killed Mary simply because he found himself with an opportunity to do so. If it hadn't been her it could have been another Liz - Prater this time, and those who currently theorise that Kate was killed because she used the name Mary Kelly would now be reading something into the name Liz and theorising that Diddles was the underlying cause of all the murders.

Love,

Caz
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[Dan Norder]

Hi Glenn,

You were joking here, right?

He was... he just wasn't aware that he was.

[Sam Flynn]

there would be light from windows, lamps, the moon, light pollution. it was not pitch black, and in dim light, colours are less pronounced they do not become black and white (did anyone else study optics & light in physics here?).

You need a smattering of physiology, too, Joel. The retina's cone cells (colour receptors) are more efficient in bright light, and are more sensitive to frequencies towards the red part of the spectrum. Rod cells (black and white receptors) are more efficient in dim conditions, and are sensitised towards the blue end of the spectrum.

In dim light, the rate of firing of the cones drops significantly, whereas the rods come into their own and dominate the sensory feedback being sent from the back of the eye to the brain. The net result is that it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between colours as the incident light gets dimmer, and there comes a cut-off point where certain hues are very difficult to discern.

Reds suffer particularly badly in this regard, due to the fact that the cone cells are optimised to detect light of a lower frequency - reds, oranges etc. So, when the cones start to "fall asleep" (as 'twere) in dim light, the ability to distinguish red is usually the first to degrade.

No amount of dark-adaptation can resolve this, because there is a natural threshold, physiologically determined, below which the cone cells (colour receptors) don't work very well at all. That's not to say that everything turns black and white, of course, only that colour perception gradually deteriorates with dimmer lighting conditions.

This phenomenon is exploited by photographers and astronomers (I'm an amateur too: 250mm Newtonian reflector + 100mm Apochromatic refractor) when they use dim red light for developing film or reading star-charts. The blue-sensitive rods aren't particularly responsive to red light, so you don't lose much dark-adaptation if you use a weak red bulb or torch to work by.

[Glenn Lauritz Andersson]

Hi Glenn,

You were joking here, right?

No, I was exaggerating.
My point was that today we are constantly flooded with media reports from the Internet, televison, rdio, papers etc. and such occurrences as serial killing is far more common knowledge today than it was in 1888. Although the media coverage even today might be large in extreme case, we are fed with more of this stuff than these people over a hundred years ago. It shall also be noted that the hysteria must be connected to the Victorian context - the crimes weren't most likely regarded as horrific due to their character alone, but also the fact that they were regarded as sexually oriented and happened in a politically sensitive area of London, which brought the 'shameful prostitution' and the social issues into the limelight. In Victorian England such news would make a more explosive impact than they would be today for that reason alone.

Even the authorities were concerned over the murders' impact on 'weak minds' and I think the 600 rather morbid Ripper letters penned by members of the general public really illustrates what went on in people's heads. This is not really an exceptionally controversial view - in fact, several experts and researchers have quite clearly expressed this in documentaries and books. It's a matter of looking at the historical context and realize that the people of 1888 didn't live in the buzzing media climate and shared the same social values as we do today and were affected differently. I mean, this is not really rocket science.

Yes, I don’t know why Glenn keeps bringing up Buck, if he knows of scores of better examples where the victims of domestic murder were dehumanised and depersonalised after death for complex emotional reasons (which is his whole argument re MJK), rather than destroyed for the very practical one of self-preservation.

These kinds of stupid remarks is exactly why I hesitate to bring up any examples at all, since Buck Ruxton was only one of several examples I've brought up.
News flash - I will never be able to come up with a crime that looks like a carbon copy of the Kelly murder, because each crime is individual. The point is to show what people are capable of doing to their spouses, wives or girlfriends - regardless of their motives for doing it.
I would have thought even such a simple point would get across.

All the best

[caz]

Morning Glenn,

I do appreciate the point you make about the huge impact the crimes had on the public in 1888. What people don’t generally appreciate is being force fed arguments with the aid of pointless over-the-top exaggerations* to artificially strengthen them. It doesn’t wash and it treats the readers like idiots. It can actually only serve to make a weak argument weaker if you need to employ such tactics.

[*“If the Ripper murders happened today they would hardly fill a column and would most likely not even reach the international papers.”]

I put it to you that the reason you hesitate to bring up a comparable example of what you insist Mary’s murder was basically about (ie a close associate of hers who needed to kill her and then severely mutilate her, for psychological, not practical reasons, so your ‘carbon copy’ objection doesn’t work - I’m not asking for one) is that you don’t have one handy.

It’s no good separating the motive from the act if the only examples you have are of killers who were obliged to mutilate, destroy or dispose of the bodies of their loved ones if they were to stand any chance of getting away with their crime. It actually makes the point for me that it is incredibly difficult for anyone to escape justice when they kill someone who can be directly linked to them, hence the extreme lengths to which such killers have traditionally gone to cover their tracks, which we only know about because they still failed to do a thorough enough job. You need to drop every single case where bodies could have been mutilated with the intent to hinder identification of victim and killer, and you need to find one where the mutilations were personal, compulsive and carried out with anything but self-preservation in mind.

We already know what violent acts people are capable of inflicting on those they profess to love - and they either tend to turn themselves in soon afterwards when the horror of what they have done hits them or they realise they are never going to get away with it, or else they move heaven and earth to conceal and deny the crime.

What you ideally need are more examples of domestic violence that bear some resemblance to the damage inflicted on Mary than corresponding examples of serial mutilation murders. You have often claimed such cases exist, but if none come close to the ‘once seen never forgotten’ mark - an uneasy distinction that the MJK photos can boast, or if the violence was part of the disposal process, what are you left with?

Everything else is hot air, exaggeration or stating the bleedin’ obvious.

Love,

Caz
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