The case evidence and its implications

[Abby Normal]

didn't the 1874 torso have evidence of being decomposed in Lime?

so we have Whitehall which might have had condys fluid administered and the 1874 torso with lime. any others?

[jerryd]

Thanks, Jerry. Yes, the way Hebbert describes things in his essays is that the cut edges were very much decomposed and full of maggots but not the surface of the skin itself. If this were due to a preservative wouldn't he have mentioned that? Hebbert made detailed observations about the marks on the skin surface made from the strings used to wrap the torso for example. The use of a disinfectant on the remains before discovery would have been crucial inquest evidence I would think? Separate to Hebbert's own interest in forensic examination.

Thank you, Debs.

Yes, I agree Dr. Hebbert was thorough and probably would have noted that. Christer's comment is interesting and I wonder what changes the body would have made up to the time Dr. Hebbert examined it?

I am wondering also, after finding the following in Lloyds Weekly, if William Angle may have been the Daily Telegraph journalist who made the Condy's Fluid remark? Do you know what publication he worked for, Debs?

[bolo]

Hi Fisherman,

"Fair and not much decomposed"? Wasn't the skin supposed to be kind of purple? Or did that color go away in the disinfectant storing...?

prolonged exposure to light or air will make the permanganate content take on a brown-ish look. If the bodies/body parts sprinkled (?) with Condy's Fluid were kept packed away in a dark place before the killer got rid of them, the purple colour of the chemical would have been weakened but still visible.

Since the substance also isn't very stable in a solution, it would have had to be used repeatedly to be effective.

I've worked with that stuff on several occasions and its colouring or staining properties often gave me trouble.

Regards,

Boris

[Joshua Rogan]

"Fair and not much decomposed"? Wasn't the skin supposed to be kind of purple? Or did that color go away in the disinfectant storing...?

Was it due to the natural process of decay? A resident of Cable Street described the Pinchin St torso as follows;

"So far as I could see the trunk was not ripped up, but it was turning purple."

[Joshua Rogan]

didn't the 1874 torso have evidence of being decomposed in Lime?

so we have Whitehall which might have had condys fluid administered and the 1874 torso with lime. any others?

The arm found in Lambeth was also covered in lime. At first it was thought to belong to the Whitehall torso, but in the end I seem to recall it was decided that it was probably removed from a grave somewhere. At any rate, it wasn't mentioned by Hebbert at all.

[Debra A]

Thank you, Debs.

Yes, I agree Dr. Hebbert was thorough and probably would have noted that. Christer's comment is interesting and I wonder what changes the body would have made up to the time Dr. Hebbert examined it?

I am wondering also, after finding the following in Lloyds Weekly, if William Angle may have been the Daily Telegraph journalist who made the Condy's Fluid remark? Do you know what publication he worked for, Debs?

He wrote for the Globe and the People, Jerry. I don't think I've seen mention of the Daily telegraph.

[Debra A]

"Fair and not much decomposed"? Wasn't the skin supposed to be kind of purple? Or did that color go away in the disinfectant storing...?

When the jury visited the mortuary the body was described as being 'of a dark brown colour'.

[Fisherman]

When the jury visited the mortuary the body was described as being 'of a dark brown colour'.

So maybe what Hebbert aimed for was to describe the skin as belonging to a caucasian...? Otherwise, its a bit of an enigma.

[Kattrup]

Hello there, Kattrup!

Many thanks for answering "yes" to my question. Most people have not gotten round to doing that, and I really don't think it is because they disagree - I think it is because they agree but don't want to say that.

You’re welcome. I think the main reason for not answering would be people disagreeing with the premises and the conclusions you seem intent on drawing.

At any rate, you are of course completely correct. The answer is sort of statistical/logical and unavoidable; whatever a killer does to a body goes down with the police as being likely/logical to appear with the next body too. It belongs to how the police did their work - whenever a series of murders appear in a geographically defined area, they will look for similarities, the reason being that it is less likely with one killer per murder than with a series of murder perpetrated by the same killer.

Now, moving on, you say that we don't know that any of the torso victims were eviscerated, "in the sense you (being me) use it".

The sense I use it is the one suggested by the dictionaries, f ex the Oxford dictionary:
Definition of eviscerate in English:

eviscerate

VERB

[WITH OBJECT]formal

• 1Disembowel (a person or animal)
  ‘the goat had been skinned and neatly eviscerated’
  More example sentences
  Synonyms
  1. 1.1 Deprive (something) of its essential content.
     ‘myriad little concessions that would eviscerate the project’
     More example sentences
  2. 1.2Surgery Remove the contents of (the eyeball).

Origin

Late 16th century: from Latin eviscerat- ‘disembowelled’, from the verb eviscerare, from e- (variant of ex-) ‘out’ + viscera ‘internal organs’. Pronunciation

eviscerate

/ɪˈvɪsəreɪt/

I don’t think you use the word as neutrally as that. Jackson was not eviscerated, she was dismembered and cut to pieces. In that process her inner organs were removed but that is not eviscerating. In the goat-example above the inference is that the goat is still whole.

When you argue that the torsokiller was an eviscerator, you use eviscerating as an end in itself. That is a theory, unproven. Just as the term “dismemberment” can seduce our understanding of what happened, so can other words.

If you ask Gareth, he will conform that this is how I define evisceration: it is about the removal of inner organs from a body. Nota bene that there is no underlying reason as such added, just as there should not be. And here is where there's good news for you: evisceration can be led on by a large number of reasons! It can be about an urge to take organs out, about sadism, about necrosadism, about cannibalism, about curiosity, about a psychosis, telling somebody that it is vital that organs are taken out and in all probability about a few more reasons too.

So this is good for somebody who is arguing that the eviscerations performed on Jackson could/would have had other reasons than those performed on the Ripper victims - we can suggest innumerable reasons. There is a candy box full of them.

But here's the problem.

You agree that when there are organs missing from a person who has been killed by somebody who we know has eviscerations on his CV, those missing organs are likely to have been removed by the killer. And that is on account of how statistics and logic rules these matters. They support your take, in other words.

as said, we don’t know that the torso killer took organs or eviscerated therefore it does not follow that he is identical to the ripper.

But on the "why did they eviscerate?" issue, it is the other way around.

Whenever two series of murders contain striking and odd similarities, just as I said at the outset, the police will work from the assumption of a single killer. If there are dissimilarities in the case that makes it impossible, they will work from an assumption of two or more killers, perhaps with internal knowledge about what the other/s killer/s are doing. For example, if two people are killed manually and simultaneously in Oslo and Rio de Janeiro, they cannot have the same killer. It is impossible. But if they both have "Kilroy did it" engraved on their butts, there WILL be a link nevertheless. More than one killer, thus, but a certainty about a link.

In our cases, there is no such difference involved. We have the same city and the same time period, and we have the murders and dumpings close to each other (regardless of how some will have it that they were worlds apart). If we measure the walking distance from Durward Street (formerly Bucks Row) down to Dymock Street, right by where the river Wandle enters the Thames, the place where the police believed the parts from the torsos were thrown in the river, we get less than eight miles, a stretch that can be walked in under two and a half hour!

So no geographical or chronological obstacle is in place, whatsoever. Meaning that all we have is the fact that some bodies were dismembered, and there are many examples of killers who dismembers only occasionally, removing that obstacle too. The rest lies in personal interpretations of the mindsets of the killers and perceived dissimilarities inbetween the damage done to the bodies.

In short, logic dictates that we must do what the victorians could not on account of a lacking insight into these matters - we must accept what all police forces accept: if two series of murders involve a shitload of similarities, one rarer than the other, there can be no doubt that the originator of these crimes are one and the same.

the similarities are superficial and present in many violent knife murders. Not that rare. The greatest “similarity”, which I think is more of an argument, is the time period, i.e. both sets of crime happening around 1888.

And here is where you are deprived of the usefulness of knowing that there can be many reasons behind eviscerations. Because with the insight of how a common originator is the inevitable conclusion that must be drawn, follows - of course - a likelihood bordering on a certainty that the reasons for the eviscerations was the same in all cases. It generally is, with just the one killer.

We don´t know what reason the Torso killer had for eviscerating, that is correct. It is just as correct to say that we don't know what reason the Ripper had for eviscerating. They are both unknown factors. But we DO know, that the killer was in all likelihood one and the same, and we therefore also know that whatever reason there was for eviscerating, it will logically have been the same in all cases.

We know that the killers were in all likelihood different persons, and the fact that several victims had some inner organs missing will logically have different explanations in different cases.

[Harry D]

Hi Stacker
bingo. I have often brought up that point-that both were unsolved. whats the chances?

Quite high, actually. The Whitechapel murders appear to be "stranger-crimes" with the victims chosen at random, which as you well know are a bugger to solve today, let alone pre-forensics. And in the Torso case, the victims were obviously never identified, except one who was a prostitute, which made the process a syphian task. Their only hope was to catch someone in the act of murder/disposal, a confession or an eyewitness.

[Fisherman]

You’re welcome. I think the main reason for not answering would be people disagreeing with the premises and the conclusions you seem intent on drawing.

Well, we don't have the answer to that enigma, do we? But IF people disagree, they do so in the face of logic - the logic that we both can see, you and I. I really don't think that informed people would believe that missing organs from a victim in a series of murders by the same perpetrator were more probable to have gone lost for other reasons than having been taken out by that killer, if he was proven to have done so in one or more other cases if the series. So I think that you are being unfair to people and their ability to conclude logically from clear evidence implications. It seems a bit ungenerous on your behalf. Why would you and I be able to make the link, while others would miss out on it?

By the way, I am not "intent on drawing" conclusions at all. I draw conclusions, but not because I have any defined intentions other than the one to get as close to the truth as I can. It would help if you did not imply any other intent on my behalf.

Whether you want to be helpful or not is of course an entirely different matter!

I don’t think you use the word as neutrally as that. Jackson was not eviscerated, she was dismembered and cut to pieces. In that process her inner organs were removed but that is not eviscerating. In the goat-example above the inference is that the goat is still whole.

Well, if the Oxford dictionary - and the rest of the dictionaries too - define evisceration as the taking out of organs, then I tend to believe that they do so not to sweep any "real meaning" under the carpet. Taking out organs is, after all, what evisceration is about. You seem to think that a person can be EITHER dismembered OR eviscerated, but not both. I am afraid you are sorely mistaken. If an eviscerator kills somebody in premises that can be linked to himself, and if the only way he can get rid of the body unseen is to dismember the victim, then the thing to expect is that he will do precisely that. Would that mean that he waves farewell to his identity as an eviscerator and becomes a dismemberer only? In your world, apparently he would. In my world, he would not. I would regard the evisceration part as the defining part of such a killers psychopathology and the ensuing dismemberment as a necessity led on by that pathology.

I really don't see that any other thing can be argued, but you are welcome to try. Unless, that is, you realize the futility of the prospect by now.

When you argue that the torsokiller was an eviscerator, you use eviscerating as an end in itself. That is a theory, unproven. Just as the term “dismemberment” can seduce our understanding of what happened, so can other words.
as said, we don’t know that the torso killer took organs or eviscerated therefore it does not follow that he is identical to the ripper.
the similarities are superficial and present in many violent knife murders. Not that rare. The greatest “similarity”, which I think is more of an argument, is the time period, i.e. both sets of crime happening around 1888.
We know that the killers were in all likelihood different persons, and the fact that several victims had some inner organs missing will logically have different explanations in different cases.

Yes, it is unproven that the eviscerations carried out by the torso killer was an end in itself. I thought I made that very clear in my former post? I also made it clear that since there are loads of similarities, many of them extremely rare, inbetween the series, it goes without saying that they had he same originator, wherefore we should accept that in all probability, the reasons for the eviscerations in the series was always the same. Regardless of what that reason was. It remains an unidentified factor in both series.

You say that the similarities are superficial, but that is of course totally impossible to prove. The uteri, the hearts and the abdominal walls can have been taken out more or less in the exact same fashion and with more or less the exact same cuts in both series, making them anything but superficially similar only.

Since we cannot establish these factors, all we can do is to look at the rarity of the similarities. You say that they are everyday occurrences, it would seem, "present in many violent knife murders".
Really? Many knife murders involve the victims being cut open from sternum to pelvis? Many knife murders involve the killer taking out uteri? Many knife murders involve the killer taking out hearts? Many knife murders involve the killer cutting the abdominal wall away?

Is that really so, Kattrup? Or are you misrepresenting reality rather badly here? Hmm? Which is it?

Let's not forget that both series we look at, performed in the same town and in overlapping time periods, involved ALL of the above mentioned criteria. Now, I put it to you that not only will you find that less that a ridiculously small percentage of knife murders involve ANY of these ingredients, I will also say that it is my belief that you will find it hard in the extreme to find a single murder victim outside of these two series, regardless of time and place, who is recorded as having suffered all of these damages.

One of us will be correct on this, you or me. Either these are very rare occurrences, or they are involved in many knife murders, percentagewise. Let's see your evidence, Kattrup. Prove to us that these are not extremely rare matters, each and every one of them.

[Fisherman]

Quite high, actually. The Whitechapel murders appear to be "stranger-crimes" with the victims chosen at random, which as you well know are a bugger to solve today, let alone pre-forensics. And in the Torso case, the victims were obviously never identified, except one who was a prostitute, which made the process a syphian task. Their only hope was to catch someone in the act of murder/disposal, a confession or an eyewitness.

And what of the odds that two serial killers in victorian London would both kill prostitutes, take out hearts, take out uteri, take rings from their victims fingers, take away abdominal walls, cut colon sections away, cut bellies open frown sternum to pelvis - surely that narrows down the likelihood of two killers somewhat...?

[Harry D]

And what of the odds that two serial killers in victorian London would both kill prostitutes, take out hearts, take out uteri, take rings from their victims fingers, take away abdominal walls, cut colon sections away, cut bellies open frown sternum to pelvis - surely that narrows down the likelihood of two killers somewhat...?

I don't know, what are the odds?

[Sam Flynn]

I don't know, what are the odds?

If we are to assign odds, we'd better be a darned sight more precise with our criteria than Fisherman is.

[Fisherman]

I don't know, what are the odds?

Last time I asked, my bookie would not take any bets at all on a single killer.