Kellys front door, why no blood?

[Jeff Leahy]

Indeed, Jeff - although I honestly don't believe that Jack strangled his other victims to the point of causing heart failure. In the case of Catherine Eddowes (even allowing some room for error), he seems not to have had sufficient time to allow for the "luxury" of a quiescent vascular system.

Yes as you say its difficult to know for certain. However my point would be that Jack seemed aware of blood splatter and seems to have taken care to ensure that the blood flowed away from him rather than towards him. In the case of Nichols, Chapman and Eddows he appears to have cut the throats while the victims were on the ground so that the blood would travel away from him. Once this was done I'm not certain how quickly the blood preasure would drop but I would assume fairly quickly given the depth of the cuts.

It therefore seems odd to me that he would change his method of attack on MJK knowing that blood would shoot everywhere, when he apparently had more time than in the other attacks? I'm not necessarily disputing that MJK appears to have defended herself against a knife attack, just that its odd given the circumstance that he should have given such an opportunity.

He'd have to have been a very quick learner, given that it's beyond dispute that the victims he definitely "ripped" were so few in number.

Well thats largely a question of perspective. I'd say that in serial killre terms Jack was prolific in a very small space of time. For me jack was on a very steep learning curve even if we only assume Nichols, Chapman and Eddows. I would add Tabram and Stride. Killing someone is a pretty major experience in any book, and I beleive he is learning by necessity.

Given the little we actually know of his MO, I'd be very wary of making any generalisations. In the case of Kelly, the fact that she was on a bouncy surface would have somewhat complicated any effort to strangle her - and the presence of the defensive wounds on her arms strongly suggests that the killer was wielding his knife right up to the point she was killed. Furthermore, the presence of a saturated mattress and a pool of blood under the top right-hand corner of the bed are strong indicators that Kelly lost a significant quantity of blood.

Yes I agree totally, I try and remain as open minded as possible at all times.
While i find your observations interesting and logical, I cant help asking myself....WHY?

Why does Jack attack wildly slashing at Kelly with a knife throw the bed sheets, when he seems to have had plenty of time to dispatch her cleanly and efficiently....?

Does anyone else see a curious change in MO for no apparent reason?

Pirate

P.S. Thanks for your reply, trusting All is well in wales etc. Merry Xmas everyone

[Sam Flynn]

Hello Jeff,

Why does Jack attack wildly slashing at Kelly with a knife through the bed sheets, when he seems to have had plenty of time to dispatch her cleanly and efficiently....?

Firstly, Kelly seems to have put up a fight - so it might not be a question of Jack "deciding" to slash at her, more one of him having to deal with a moving target

Secondly, I don't believe that he did attack her through the bed sheets, and that Bond's conjecture on this matter has done a great disservice to posterity (subject of different thread).

Finally - a deeply cut throat is a far quicker way of ensuring death than strangulation.

Does anyone else see a curious change in MO for no apparent reason?

The apparent reason as I see it - and a good reason it is too - is that the logistics of killing of Mary Kelly were radically different to the open-air murders. The killer had no choice but to improvise with his technique, because the victim was on a bed.

[Jeff Leahy]

While I agree with your thoughts Sam, I still find it curious:

Jack has some experience by now and knows what he's doing and what he wants. Far from being more difficult surely his task is easier in the bedroom.

He has more light and his victim is drunk and asleep on the bed. Surely all he has to do is place his hard over her throat and cut quickly, much easier than Chapman or Eddows who were wide awake.

Do we not have to create some sort of senario where MJK awakes to see the knife puts up a struggle for this to make sense? Or perhaps he attacks MJK before see is asleep on the bed. However I figure it, something doesn't quite slot in place...

yes its a different environment...but why were his reactions so slow?

For now however I have no logical answer

Pirate

[Sam Flynn]

Hi Jeff,

Jack has some experience by now and knows what he's doing and what he wants.

He has experience of perhaps only three murders of this type. As learning-curves go, that's pretty steep and, let's face it, it's not as if he got more sophisticated from Nichols to Eddowes - if anything, his butchery was as crude to begin with as it was later on, if not more so.

far from being harder, surely his task is easier in the bedroom.

Quite the contrary. From Buck's Row through to Mitre Square, his arms had almost 360 degrees in which to work, whereas the presence of the mattress reduced this to 180 degrees, hampering him from below. The edge of the bed would have limited how close he could have got to his victim, and the partition wall effectively closed off his options to work from the right hand side.

[Fisherman]

Sam writes:
"Quite the contrary"

...but to be fair, Sam, we should perhaps weigh in more factors than just the ergonomical ones. Phillips said that Kelly had been moved, and there is of course the chance that she had been moved more than once, to facilitate for the killer to do what he came for. The crucial factor here is time - if he had all the time he could ask for, I thing it is a fair suggestion that in a way, the Kelly murder was an easier task than, say, the Eddowes slaying.

The best,
Fisherman

[Sam Flynn]

Sam writes:
"Quite the contrary"

...but to be fair, Sam, we should perhaps weigh in more factors than just the ergonomical ones.

Killing is a very physical activity, Fish. Ergonomics play a huge part.

Phillips said that Kelly had been moved, and there is of course the chance that she had been moved more than once, to facilitate for the killer to do what he came for. The crucial factor here is time - if he had all the time he could ask for, I thing it is a fair suggestion that in a way, the Kelly murder was an easier task than, say, the Eddowes slaying.

Eddowes did not have a whopping great bed beneath her, or a partition beside her, and her killer had almost 360 degrees of freedom in any given plane around her neck. Whether Kelly was moved after she was killed is immaterial - her killer had to operate in a far more restricted "workplace", and thus had fewer options open to him.

Temporal factors are less important, at least in terms of having had a significant impact on how Kelly was actually dispatched, in that the act of cutting the throat would have taken comparatively little time. It's not as if her killer was going to hang around until Kelly moved into an easier position - once he'd got the knife out, he had no choice but to move swiftly and get it over with.

[Fisherman]

Sam writes:

"It's not as if her killer was going to hang around until Kelly moved into an easier position - once he'd got the knife out, he had no choice but to move swiftly and get it over with"

Aha, Sam! I thought we were discussing the whole process, from the first cut to the last. That is why I meant that the time factor played an important role. Of course, if it only the throatcutting that is up for grabs, then I agree - the Kelly scene offered a more awkward task that the others did.

You know, somehow I think I should read up better the next time over...

The best, Sam!
Fisherman

[Jeff Leahy]

Sorry to disagree with you both but surely it depends whether MJK is asleep or not?

If she's asleep then she is an easier target than the others whether he has 180 degrees or 360 ?

The element of surprise here makes it the easiest attack...

Unless of course she wasnt asleep on the bed when he attacked.

Pirate

[Ben]

The element of surprise here makes it the easiest attack...

An axiom that the killer might well have embraced, Pirate.

Which is why I personally feel there's a good chance that the killer did attack her as she slept, whether he knew her or not.

Cheers,
Ben

[Sam Flynn]

If she's asleep then she is an easier target than the others whether he has 180 degrees or 360 ?

Not quite, Jeff. The bed and the partition were in the way, so the killer had very few options in the mode in which he attacked her. This would be true whether Kelly was awake or not at the time - unless her killer had the ability to pass through the bed like a ghost.

Unless of course she wasnt asleep on the bed when he attacked.

...if Kelly were asleep, then cutting her throat would indeed have been comparatively simply done. As there was clear evidence of defensive wounds, then she was almost certainly conscious when her killer struck.

But... whether Kelly was conscious or not, that is a different discussion entirely. If anyone wants to explore it, please do hop onto an appropriate thread and we'll pick it up there.

[Wickerman]

... Given the little we actually know of his MO, I'd be very wary of making any generalisations. In the case of Kelly, the fact that she was on a bouncy surface would have somewhat complicated any effort to strangle her - and the presence of the defensive wounds on her arms strongly suggests that the killer was wielding his knife right up to the point she was killed. ...

Sam.
When we compare Kelly's murder with those of Nichols, Chapman & Eddowes, the fact he now had a victim indoors might suggest the killer would have found perfection with respect to privacy.
Nichols on a narrow dark backstreet, Chapman in a secluded backyard, Eddowes in a darkened corner of a square.
Wouldn't we then expect the killer to now have found a perfect opportunity to play out his M.O. in Millers Court?

If we agree that strangulation appears to have been the first step with earlier murders then surely we would also expect the same with Kelly's murder. He has her in the perfect environment, a room of her own - so why does he not follow his previous M.O.?
For the killer to employ his initial manouver his victim needs to be on her feet, he is not going to try to strangle her while she is laying down!

At some point in this secluded liason Kelly must have been standing in her room, clothed or unclothed makes no difference, this then would be the most opportunistic time for the killer to strike.
If he strangled her while standing, as was his normal M.O., then why undress her?
If those wounds to Kelly's arms are indeed defensive wounds, she was not strangled, or at least not successfully - in a perfect environment? - why not?, why did he fail to apply his initial technique with no chance of interuptions?

We could go on digging deeper with 'if's' and 'but's', .... but, what we end up looking at is a murder that becomes more removed from a JtR murder by every 'why not?' that we throw up.

It strikes me that the corpse of Mary Kelly was left in such a condition that the authorities would have no doubt who to attribute her murder to, yet the M.O. of her murder is not indicative of what we think we know of this same killer - "..this is a three pipe problem, Watson!.."

Best Wishes, Jon

[Pippin Joan]

He has her in the perfect environment, a room of her own - so why does he not follow his previous M.O.?

For the killer to employ his initial manouver his victim needs to be on her feet, he is not going to try to strangle her while she is laying down!

At some point in this secluded liaison Kelly must have been standing in her room, clothed or unclothed makes no difference, this then would be the most opportunistic time for the killer to strike.

Best Wishes, Jon

Why does a killer have to duplicate a supposed MO in every single murder, despite great differences in circumstances? If you hope to disarm a woman on a public street, you choose the most efficient way. She is walking with you, and there is the possibility of someone hearing you. If you are in a woman's bedroom, behind a locked door, you have other options. Jack's MO is in what he does with the body. His method of rendering them unconscious is a matter of efficiency.

[Sam Flynn]

When we compare Kelly's murder with those of Nichols, Chapman & Eddowes, the fact he now had a victim indoors might suggest the killer would have found perfection with respect to privacy. Wouldn't we then expect the killer to now have found a perfect opportunity to play out his M.O. in Millers Court?

To do so would be to assume that he aspired to "perfection" in the first place, Jon. In order to do that, one must make further assumptions as to precisely what he was seeking to "perfect". If we were to assume that he was simply hell-bent on making as much mess of his victims as possible - and frankly I see no reason to suppose otherwise - he certainly seems to have succeeded in Miller's Court.

If we agree that strangulation appears to have been the first step with earlier murders

Ah, but I don't agree! With the possible exception of Annie Chapman, I see scant evidence of strangulation among the C5. Certainly not with Eddowes, where the detailed medical notes are bested only by Bond's report on Kelly herself, and where there's not so much as a flicker of a suggestion that she was strangled.

[Sam Flynn]

Good post, Joan. Couldn't agree more.

[FrankO]

Wouldn't we then expect the killer to now have found a perfect opportunity to play out his M.O. in Millers Court?

Hi Jon,

Not necessarily, as the situation was clearly different from the outside murders. In those cases, his victims were standing up preparing (or so they thought) to service him and nothing else, while Kelly was probably lying on the far right side of the bed. I can imagine that the Ripper waited for the right moment to attack, a moment when his victims weren't paying too much attention to him. For instance, he could have waited untill they were focusing on putting away the money he'd just given them or on lifting their skirts for him. I can well imagine that things didn't work the same way in Kelly's case.

He has her in the perfect environment, a room of her own - so why does he not follow his previous M.O.?
For the killer to employ his initial manouver his victim needs to be on her feet, he is not going to try to strangle her while she is laying down!

Like I said, maybe things with Kelly didn't play out the way he'd 'gotten used to' with his other victims. She didn't need to put away the money in her clothes somewhere, she could just have put it on the table or whatever. She didn't just need to raise her skirts to service him because she had a bed. They had more privacy, so she could move around her room and away from him so that that perfect moment didn't present itself in the way it had before. She could have sat down immediately, taking off her boots, she could have asked him to light the candle or the fire while she started undressing, or whatever.

So, I think that either the perfect moment didn't present itself to him while she was standing up, or he came into the room while she was asleep. In the former he may have waited for her to doze off. Whatever the situation, there's no reason to think he hadn't wanted to strangle her. If she was lying on the far side of the bed, already dozing off or completely asleep, he probably had to put a knee on the bed before he could reach her. This may have woken her, which may have forced her killer to use the knife immediately and skip the strangling. I suspect that something like that happened and that she was only able to raise her right hand and perhaps utter a single cry of murder.

If he strangled her while standing, as was his normal M.O., then why undress her?

Obviously, then he would have had access to her whole body. I'd expect that to be much more interesting to a killer such as the Ripper.

If those wounds to Kelly's arms are indeed defensive wounds, she was not strangled, or at least not successfully - in a perfect environment?

I very much doubt if those wounds in her arms were indeed defensive wounds. The only wounds I suspect to be defensive wounds are the small wounds that were inflicted on her right hand.

All the best,
Frank