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Sam writes:
"Aborted mid-cut, though, Fish? I have enough problems dealing with the Diemschutz "interruption" theory, without this as well! Seriously, the intent - if there was any in Tabram's case - was on raining blow after blow on the upper body with a knife, as far as I see it... and as far as the evidence suggests."
Well, Sam, the easy solution to your trouble would be to skip the Diemschutz interruption, and take on board the Tabram ditto. If you feel you can harbour only the one, that would be the wiser choice, I think!
As for what the evidence suggests, I am all for your suggestion that it points to a man that subjected Martha to a hailstorm of stabs. And they all rained down on the upper or mid part of her torso - but for one. That one apparently did NOT rain down; it is and remains a cut.
Place it in the midst of the stabs, and I would say "he probably slipped, the knife may have skidded". But once it becomes the ONLY knife-wound in the area where the Ripper focused his interest, and once we realize it was not a stab, then the evidence does not tell us that this particular wound belongs to the flurry of stabs that our pissed-off customer inflicted. Instead it becomes a wound where we cannot tell if it was made by the pen-knife or the sturdier, larger blade.
And so we have to ask ourselves "what would be the main difference inbetween the pen-knife wounds and the sternum wound?"
My answer to that question is that the former seem totally unstructured and irrational. They seem to me to be the work of a rage, where the goal was not to pinpoint certain target areas, but instead to annihilate, and that is what a flurry of enraged, frenzied stabs always seem to end up as.
The breastplate wound, though: Different thing altogether! To penetrate the sternum takes a forceful blow, and under the sternum lies the heart. A stab there seems to be something quite different than the frenzied stabs. It looks like a very intentional, very focused effort to kill - something I think only the fewest would argue against.
In this context, when we need to ascribe the wound - the cut, as it were - on the lower abdomen to either school of thinking, we need to ask ourselves if there could be a rational thinking behind it. And lo and behold - we know that there was a man loose on the streets of East who was driven by an urge to open up the abdominal cavity and eviscerate!
Adding things up, we are either dealing with a frenzied stabber that succeeded to place ALL his stabs in the mid or upper torso of his victim - and that would reasonably in some respect owe to the position the stabber was in visavi Tabram as he stabbed away! - but suddenly decided to throw a stab in a radically different direction and somehow made a hash of it, resulting in some sort of a skid...
...or we are dealing with somebody who quite deliberately started to CUT instead of stabbing. And as evidence has it we KNOW that such a creature was about in them very streets in that very time, Sam! And we also know that stabbing through chestbones never seemed to belong to his agenda, which is why we can allow oursleves the speculation that if the man who cut Tabrams abdomen WAS Jack - then the chest-thrust quite probably reveals that he was forced to abort his true mission.
Such a scenario actually lets us participate, wound by wound, at the Tabram crimescene, and we may explain each of the wounds, pinpointing the two last ones very exactly.
With Diemschutz, we have no such exact scenario. The killer may have left as Louis arrived, and he may have been long gone at that time, we can´t tell. Assuming an interruption in that case seems a lot more far-fetched to me than it does in Tabrams case. In that case, we also have what may be a killer carrying out his first strike, with all the implications that carries. There may not have to have been a factual interruption - maybe he was simply spooked. The fact that he would have been encountering a living woman where he expected a dead one, though, makes for a very compelling suggestion as to how the interruption came about, at least to my mind.
The best, Sam!
Fisherman
"Aborted mid-cut, though, Fish? I have enough problems dealing with the Diemschutz "interruption" theory, without this as well! Seriously, the intent - if there was any in Tabram's case - was on raining blow after blow on the upper body with a knife, as far as I see it... and as far as the evidence suggests."
Well, Sam, the easy solution to your trouble would be to skip the Diemschutz interruption, and take on board the Tabram ditto. If you feel you can harbour only the one, that would be the wiser choice, I think!
As for what the evidence suggests, I am all for your suggestion that it points to a man that subjected Martha to a hailstorm of stabs. And they all rained down on the upper or mid part of her torso - but for one. That one apparently did NOT rain down; it is and remains a cut.
Place it in the midst of the stabs, and I would say "he probably slipped, the knife may have skidded". But once it becomes the ONLY knife-wound in the area where the Ripper focused his interest, and once we realize it was not a stab, then the evidence does not tell us that this particular wound belongs to the flurry of stabs that our pissed-off customer inflicted. Instead it becomes a wound where we cannot tell if it was made by the pen-knife or the sturdier, larger blade.
And so we have to ask ourselves "what would be the main difference inbetween the pen-knife wounds and the sternum wound?"
My answer to that question is that the former seem totally unstructured and irrational. They seem to me to be the work of a rage, where the goal was not to pinpoint certain target areas, but instead to annihilate, and that is what a flurry of enraged, frenzied stabs always seem to end up as.
The breastplate wound, though: Different thing altogether! To penetrate the sternum takes a forceful blow, and under the sternum lies the heart. A stab there seems to be something quite different than the frenzied stabs. It looks like a very intentional, very focused effort to kill - something I think only the fewest would argue against.
In this context, when we need to ascribe the wound - the cut, as it were - on the lower abdomen to either school of thinking, we need to ask ourselves if there could be a rational thinking behind it. And lo and behold - we know that there was a man loose on the streets of East who was driven by an urge to open up the abdominal cavity and eviscerate!
Adding things up, we are either dealing with a frenzied stabber that succeeded to place ALL his stabs in the mid or upper torso of his victim - and that would reasonably in some respect owe to the position the stabber was in visavi Tabram as he stabbed away! - but suddenly decided to throw a stab in a radically different direction and somehow made a hash of it, resulting in some sort of a skid...
...or we are dealing with somebody who quite deliberately started to CUT instead of stabbing. And as evidence has it we KNOW that such a creature was about in them very streets in that very time, Sam! And we also know that stabbing through chestbones never seemed to belong to his agenda, which is why we can allow oursleves the speculation that if the man who cut Tabrams abdomen WAS Jack - then the chest-thrust quite probably reveals that he was forced to abort his true mission.
Such a scenario actually lets us participate, wound by wound, at the Tabram crimescene, and we may explain each of the wounds, pinpointing the two last ones very exactly.
With Diemschutz, we have no such exact scenario. The killer may have left as Louis arrived, and he may have been long gone at that time, we can´t tell. Assuming an interruption in that case seems a lot more far-fetched to me than it does in Tabrams case. In that case, we also have what may be a killer carrying out his first strike, with all the implications that carries. There may not have to have been a factual interruption - maybe he was simply spooked. The fact that he would have been encountering a living woman where he expected a dead one, though, makes for a very compelling suggestion as to how the interruption came about, at least to my mind.
The best, Sam!
Fisherman
) on someone`s doorstep.
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