Comparing with Tabrum with non Ripper victims.

[Lewis C]

Being a poverty-class woman living in Whitechapel in the late Summer/Autumn of 1888 and indulging in casual prostitution aren't sufficient criteria to rule her in, because those criteria applied to hundreds, if not thousands of unfortunates in the East End. I tend to focus on what clearly characterises Tabram's death - i.e. that she was killed in a frenzied shower of stab wounds to her neck and chest, which is completely different from any of the other WM's, never mind just the canonical Ripper victims.

You did the same thing again here: picked one of the reasons for suspecting she's a Ripper victim, and then said that that reason isn't enough. I agree that that reason alone isn't enough. All of the reasons combined may be another matter.

[FrankO]

The remaining two stabs - just two - were in the lower abdomen,...

I've seen you claim several times that there were just two wounds to the lower abdomen, Gareth. Did I miss something in the evidence? Because if I count all the wounds delivered to the organs & neck, I arrive at 30 wounds. Plus the 3 inch wound on the lower abdomen makes 31. Of course, some of the stabs may not have hit any organs, so they may have been in, for instance, the shoulders or the legs as some newspapers have it, or they may just not have reached deep enough to wound any organs, but how are you so sure there were only 2 wounds to the lower abdomen? A genuine question, so I'd genuinely appreciate your reaction...

[Sam Flynn]

I always believed that there were only two lower abdominal wounds documented, Frank. Besides, whether it was two or three, there are 35+ in the neck, chest and upper abdomen, so it's clear that those areas were the focus of the killer's frenzied attack... if he had a "focus" at all.

Secondly, the fact that some of the wounds were deep enough to puncture some organs is inconsequential. The stabs were directed at the neck, thorax and upper abdomen, and any damage to underlying organs is almost certainly incidental. I see absolutely no reason to suppose that any wounds which didn't also puncture organs were left unrecorded.

[FrankO]

I always believed that there were only two lower abdominal wounds documented, Frank. Besides, whether it was two or three, there are 35+ in the neck, chest and upper abdomen, so it's clear that those areas were the focus of the killer's frenzied attack... if he had a "focus" at all.

Secondly, the fact that some of the wounds were deep enough to puncture some organs is inconsequential. The stabs were directed at the neck, thorax and upper abdomen, and any damage to underlying organs is almost certainly incidental. I see absolutely no reason to suppose that any wounds which didn't also puncture organs were left unrecorded.

Thanks for your reply, Gareth, although you haven’t really given the answer what I was looking for. I’d hoped you’d have pointed me to evidence on which you base that there were only 2 lower abdominal wounds and 37 wounds to the neck, chest and upper abdomen. Just so I’d have the picture of her murder right.

Maybe I’ve muddled my question by talking about the possibility that some of the wounds weren’t deep enough to hit any organs, but that was just one possibility for why 8 wounds weren’t mentioned by Killeen and aren’t accounted for in the evidence we have, as far as I can tell.

Like you, I also see absolutely no reason to suppose that any wounds were left unrecorded, but what I do see is that only 30 wounds in the upper body are accounted for in the evidence we’re left with and 1 in the lower abdomen.

I think my view is closer to yours than you might think. As I’ve said before, I agree that the attack on Tabram was a frenzied one. If she was killed by the Ripper - which I’d put at some 55% chance – then him killing some woman that night hadn’t been on his mind until it happened, in a haphazard fashion with the raising of her skirt and the small cut on her abdomen as a sort of afterthought.

It’s very clear to me that she wasn’t attacked in the way the Ripper attacked Nichols, Chapman, Eddowes and Kelly, just as it’s clear to me that Stride was attacked in a somewhat different way. To me, that means that something about her murder was quite different than with Nichols and the others, or otherwise, she would have been attacked in a way that was closer to how the others were attacked. My view is that by the time Tabram was killed, the Ripper would have already had a ‘blueprint’ fantasy about what he would do to women, which he tried to act out with Nichols, etc. I think what he did to Kelly came the closest to that 'blueprint'.

Cheers