Kelly's Killer

[lynn cates]

canon

Hello David. Thanks. You might wish to have a go at "canon" in a dictionary.

If you think about "canon" in other contexts, you will find that it does not always imply "same hand." (Eg, "canon of scripture.")

Cheers.
LC

[lynn cates]

dumbed down

Hello Jon. "Dumbed down" is accurate. But I'm not sure why one would wish to do that. Don't some researchers think that "Jack" wished to be written about and feared? Perhaps you are suggesting that he was trying to avoid association with the first two murders?

By "careful" are you suggesting "skill"?

Cheers.
LC

[lynn cates]

varia

Hello Rya.

"I suppose Martha suffered stabbing injuries to the genitalia, but I have never seen anything but vague references to this point in discussions of the murder."

Yes, it seems that she did.

"Yes, it could be consistent with the later murders . . ."

Perhaps. Of course, some researchers think they see anger in Tabram's death and yet not in the others.

"but there are obviously a lot of other problems with Tabram being a Ripper murder."

Yes. I agree that it is obvious.

"If it was, then it was an initial attempt that went totally wrong."

What went wrong? If the point was to kill, it was successful.

"For some reason, I've always thought it possible that the murderer of Tabram killed her with her own knife, which he wrestled away from her in the struggle (many prostitutes would have carried such short blades on their person for protection). The final blow with the second, longer weapon would have been done last, as an addendum."

Yes. Quite possible. But I wonder how noise was avoided in such a fracas?

"Anyway, we do tend to focus on the differences between the victims today more than their similarities, don't we?'

I think the trend is to see all the WCM as by one hand, and to regard them all as prostitutes, even when the evidence for such conclusions is sparse at best.

"Thus Tabram is one murderer, Stride another, Eddowes's killer yet different from Chapman's, and then Kelly's as still another. And let's not forget the "torso" murders, which were going on at the same time. But looking at all these crimes, and considering that they occur in a relatively short span of time in a relatively confined area where there had been no such crimes before, we should also pause to ask how so many killers, if there were so many, could have suddenly materialized from the ether to prey on all these essentially homeless, destitute women all at once. Had something gotten into the water? Dracula's boat arriving in London? While I don't wish to suggest that each of these murders was committed by the same culprit--far from it--I also find that it strains credulity to take the diametrically opposite view."

OK. Then where would you like to draw the line? 2 murderers? 4? You will notice that, if you posit more than one, the argument you give can still be offered, even if in slightly modified form.

Notice that there were few letters sent to CNA claiming to be a murderer BEFORE the "Dear Boss." Then a proliferation. One writer? Many?

And that is why my focus is on other items besides previous murders, "credibility," etc. I try to go over the killings and reconstruct them forensically. There are similarities; there are differences. How to interpret them?

Cheers.
LC

[DVV]

Hello David. Of course MJK is canonical. The canon was fixed by Bond/MacNaughten and ever shall be the same.
And she will be canonical even IF she were found definitely to be by another hand. The "canon" is a meta-concept and has NOTHING to do with who killed whom.
Cheers.
LC

Hi Lynn. Stay with us, my dear. Canonical simply means she was killed by the man who killed Annie Chapman.

[Barnaby]

When I look at the picture of the death scene of Mary Kelly, that - to me - will always be the work of Jack the Ripper. That's what got me into this case as a youth, that is what still evokes an emotional response to this case 120 years after the murders, and - taking the emotion out of it - there is no preponderence of evidence to dismiss Kelly as a Ripper victim.

In the annals of the history of serial killers, has there ever been a copycat killer that upstaged the work of the original? I don't think so.

[Rya]

I had always seen the injuries to the pubic mound as a necessary consequence of digging around in a small cavity with a knife that was too long. The injuries on Eddowes may be purposeful, but they are also almost exactly what you would see if her killer was not in full control of the knife. Especially if the thigh wounds were higher on the top of the leg and lower on the bottom. Given that she was wearing three layers of buttoned clothing and the abdominal incision is a wreck, I don't think he was in control of his knife. Removing external genitalia takes about three seconds. It doesn't require time or privacy. Inner and outer labia and clitoris are right there if he wanted them. But he didn't until Kelly. Why?

And you can answer this, it's been driving me nuts. Oblique to what plane? Oblique to the vertical plane means cuts that angle from skin to musculature. Wedged cuts, if you will. Oblique to the horizontal plane means diagonal. And if oblique to the vertical plane, is it oblique from the tip of the knife or the blade?

By oblique, I mean--and I expect this is the meaning when used by a medico like Phillips or Brown--oblique in relation to the surface of the abdomen (or whatever) in terms of the blade of the knife. Exactly how acute an angle to the surface might vary: in a medical dissection, 10 to 30 degrees would be typical to avoid impairing the underlying tissues and organs; in an autopsy, it would be a more subjective comment, which is always a problem. In Eddowes for example, the killer seems to have driven the tip of the knife downward in the inception of the incision (note the perforation of the liver) then turned the blade sideways at a more slanting angle. He had to re-start his incision more than once (as when circumventing the umbilicus), but he always returned to this angle--probably about 35-45 degrees.

Now what is interesting about this is the degree to which it recurs in a haphazard fashion in not only the abdominal mutilations, but in other places as well. Consider the cuts on Kate's thighs. Or even on her cheeks. Here, the killer doesn't need to use the tip of the knife at all; it is rather a peeling motion, with the blade laid virtually flat against the skin. By comparison, and returning to the abdominal cuts, there is this little stunner which I found in the latest edition of the Begg, et al A to Z on Nichols, under the entry for Inspector Spratling (which I would like the original source of): "The flesh, he said, was turned over from left to right, the intestines exposed" (483). I have always wondered why, on medical grounds, the doctors saw a connection between the mutilations of Nichols and Chapman; here it is. What is described here seems to be an oblique incision, made in a criss-cross fashion, across the surface of the stomach area, thus producing a flap that was reflected, exposing the guts of the dead woman. In Chapman, the killer presumably does something similar, although here for convenience he removes the resulting flaps entirely.

Personally, I don't think the killer lacked control of his knife in Eddowes, but you have to take into account the contingencies he was dealing with. If he really cut through the underlying clothing simultaneous with the incision (and there is reason to suggest he did, at least of a large degree), then that alone would cause a loss of efficiency. Then he was also standing or squatting over the body, where leverage would be limited. If he were naturally left-handed, he would have to switch the knife to his right hand given his position, which he could easily have done--I suspect he was capable with either hand--but it might have effected the precision of the cut. Lastly, the place his incision becomes messy is exactly at the point you would predict, where he encountered the denser subcutaneous tissue, fascia and muscles of the middle abdomen. In trying to divide the right rectus muscle (really a whole group of muscles), he had to resort to a protracted "sawing" action with the knife, and this is obvious in the zig-zags we see in the distressing photograph of Kate after the post-mortem.

As far as the genital mutilations go, I have no idea why he did what he did, and he probably didn't either. I suppose (and this is sickening to write about, so I apologize in advance) the obvious way to destroy the area would be to wedge the blade directly into the pudenda and core it out. But the killer's approach in Kelly's murder seemed to be to cut (again obliquely) away the entire genital protuberance across the plane of the inner thighs, from right to left. I suppose there is an erotics to this, which comes from the image of the supine female, legs spread wide with the knees bent, immodestly exposing herself for the male gaze--a conventional pornographic posture (although not necessarily in the Victorian age). In any event, the man or men who killed Eddowes and Kelly was (were) fixated on the inner thighs, and in Eddowes we see what could be an aborted attempt to cut the inner thighs away. In Kelly, this is accomplished along with what looks like a complete evacuation the reproductive organs in the pelvic cavity. The position he left the body in was that eroticized posture I have just described, although without anything left to focus the gaze on.

Why not do this in Eddowes? Hard to say; perhaps the extengencies of time, or maybe because he hadn't thought it out yet. The fact that his victim was sans underpants may have surprised him. Or perhaps it is a matter of age. The earlier victims (and this is assuming the same killer here, which is not a given) may have reminded him of something maternal. He had plenty of time to do whatever he wanted to Chapman, but he did not. He did not scar her face, for example. He rendered her insensible before ending her life. In Eddowes, he may have been enraged by the circumstances of the evening, or by Eddowes herself, who seemed, despite her age, to have retained a girlish, irreverant demeanor. But the much younger, more attractive Kelly was a different matter. He showed her the knife, slashed her throat, and stared into her eyes while she drowned in her own blood, something that would have taken less than a minute but would have seemed to go on forever. She knew who he was when she died. He made her suffer. It was different, in ways that extended beyond the punishment and grotesque exhibition of her corpse afterwards.

[Wickerman]

So people can draw their own conclusions to all of this. I find more simularities between Eddowes and Kelly than I do between Eddowes and Chapman (where asphxyia was also present). I can see Phillip's reluctance to assume that the latter two were killed by the same man. But I also see some details in Kelly that corresspond to each of the earlier murders.

I also see the extraction of the kidney in Eddowes as more consistent with the mutilations on Chapman. The same killer may have "dumbed-down" his next attempt on Eddowes to make it not look so "experienced", yet the "careful" removal of the kidney maybe our clue that the same hand was at work.

Regards, Jon S.

[Wickerman]

I'd bet on at least an hour.

I wouldn't have thought so long, no more than 30 minutes, but still, if he was not in a hurry, he may have relished what he was doing. Pausing occasionally to appreciate his masterpiece?

Some of this requires quite a bit of turning flipping and tipping a dead body.
Her organs were excised and placed about, some under her head like a pillow. I mean this stuff does not cut like butter. It's easily a three knife job because the blades would dull so quickly, and I'm not sure he had more than one knife.

Agree entirely (except the tipping), the fact such a decimation should take several sharpenings, too noisy, or several knives, requiring a bag, is not typically considered.
The real "Jack" is not allowed to carry a bag, too hollywood'esq for some to stomach. Carrying several knives in your pocket, especially 8" blades, is noisy and particularly dangerous. Not many coats have 12" pockets.

Besides, why would he have several knives, unless he knew exactly what he was going to do. Nichols, Chapman & Eddowes could have been accomplished with one knife.
Unless he always carried a bag full of knives, like one of Baden Powell's scouts. Be Prepared!

And I don't think a rock solid TOD would have gotten the cops any farther than they got without one. I mean, it really seems like he could go to all this trouble to muddle the evidence, or he could wear a hat. He didn't even need to not be seen. Just not recognized.

No, I was just making light....


Regards, Jon S.

[Rya]

Hello Rya. I completely agree. There is evidence both for and against the four who were mutilated. I am glad that you do not include Liz.

Given your remarks on genitalia, I presume you also wish to consider Martha along with the four?

Cheers.
LC

Lots of things to respond here to--I try to limit my reading of this forum to once a day, so my attention doesn't wander too much from the dissertation chapter I'm supposed to be writing now. Like a kitten in a box of toys (or Jack with a fresh cadaver), the attention wanders from object to object, idea to idea.

I suppose Martha suffered stabbing injuries to the genitalia, but I have never seen anything but vague references to this point in discussions of the murder. Killeen (the doctor who performed the autopsy) was typically vague on this point, and I have seen it quoted in various ways. Yes, it could be consistent with the later murders, but there are obviously a lot of other problems with Tabram being a Ripper murder. If it was, then it was a an initial attempt that went totally wrong. For some reason, I've always thought it possible that the murderer of Tabram killed her with her own knife, which he wrestled away from her in the struggle (many prostitutes would have carried such short blades on their person for protection). The final blow with the second, longer weapon would have been done last, as an addendum.

Anyway, we do tend to focus on the differences between the victims today more than their simularities, don't we? Thus Tabram is one murderer, Stride another, Eddowes's killer yet different from Chapman's, and then Kelly's as still another. And lets not forget the "torso" murders, which were going on at the same time. But looking at all these crimes, and considering that they occur in a relatively short span of time in a relatively confined area where there had been no such crimes before, we should also pause to ask how so many killers, if there were so many, could have suddenly materialized from the ether to prey on all these essentially homeless, destitute women all at once. Had something gotten into the water? Dracula's boat arriving in London? While I don't wish to suggest that each of these murders was committed by the same culprit--far from it--I also find that it strains credulity to take the diametrically opposite view.

[Errata]

I'll bet, 20-30 minutes max. Beats a death sentence.

I'd bet on at least an hour. Some of this requires quite a bit of turning flipping and tipping a dead body. Her organs were excised and placed about, some under her head like a pillow. I mean this stuff does not cut like butter. It's easily a three knife job because the blades would dull so quickly, and I'm not sure he had more than one knife. And I don't think a rock solid TOD would have gotten the cops any farther than they got without one. I mean, it really seems like he could go to all this trouble to muddle the evidence, or he could wear a hat. He didn't even need to not be seen. Just not recognized.

[Wickerman]

That's a helluva lotta work to disguise TOD. And to not a whole lot of purpose.

I'll bet, 20-30 minutes max. Beats a death sentence.

[Errata]

Indeed. And a killer with a modicum of medical knowledge would know that decimating the corpse will destroy any means of determining Time of Death.

Algor Mortis (cooling) was, and still is, a principal method of determing ToD.
This was totally useless on Kelly's remains.

In the 19th century I think the effects of Rigor Mortis were gauged more on temperature than the presence of lactic acid.
Regardless, once again, no reliable data was obtained.

So long as he is not seen, he's scott free....

That's a helluva lotta work to disguise TOD. And to not a whole lot of purpose.

[Wickerman]

I am not convinced the sole motivation was sex. I think there were elements of lust and anger - and perhaps guilt. Perhaps the guilt was expressed by the attack on the sexual regions and organs - a kind of rage against the lust?

I think the only way to describe Mary's killing is to say that it was butchery.

Indeed. And a killer with a modicum of medical knowledge would know that decimating the corpse will destroy any means of determining Time of Death.

Algor Mortis (cooling) was, and still is, a principal method of determing ToD.
This was totally useless on Kelly's remains.

In the 19th century I think the effects of Rigor Mortis were gauged more on temperature than the presence of lactic acid.
Regardless, once again, no reliable data was obtained.

So long as he is not seen, he's scott free....

[lynn cates]

control

Hello Errata.

"The injuries on Eddowes may be purposeful, but they are also almost exactly what you would see if her killer was not in full control of the knife."

Thanks to you as well.

Cheers.
LC

[lynn cates]

sharp eye

Hello Chris.

"There was circumvention of Kate Eddowes' navel also, though it didn't appear as exact"

Thanks for that. You have a sharp eye.

Cheers.
LC