Originally posted by Fisherman
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Iīm not all that impressed by Gareths points of dissimilarities. Take, for example, the last point: "Evisceration/intent to eviscerate in 4 from 5 Ripper murders, vs evisceration in a tiny minority of torsos (and then arguably for practical reasons".
For starters, we donīt know that there was an intent to eviscerate in 4 out of 5 Ripper murders; it is a guess only. Mind you, itīs not a bad guess, but if we are to say that such an intent is proven by the similarities existing visavi the three evisceration murders, it becomes a tad silly if we rate it as a near certainty that Nichols was about to be eviscerated, but refuse to accept that victims who lost their abdominal walls and their uteri by way of knife, who sustained a cut from pubes to ribs, who had rings stolen from theor fingers and who were both prostitutes (Chapman/Jackson) were in all probability victims of the same man.
Also, it is in no way established that evisceration was only present with "a tiny minority" of the torsos. Jackson is the only PROVEN evisceration victim, but since other victims lacked organs too, it may well be that at least three out of six victims were eviscerated. Absense of evidence is not evidence of absence, least of all in the Rainham case, where the same division of the torso was done as in the Jackson case, and where - like in the Jackson case - heart and lungs and a part of the colon was missing. Once we know that Jackson WAS eviscerated, the rational guess must be that the Rainham victim was also eviscerated in much the same fashion.
Otherwise, she just happened to loose the exact same organs as Jackson did, but for the uterus. Coincidences, coincidences...
The only real difference lies in the dismemberment, and the only question we therefore need to ask is what is more likely to happen:
That a killer dismembers in some cases but not in all.
Or that two killers replicate each otherīs lists of extremely odd and rare inclusions, uteri extractions, heart extraction, ripping the stomach open from pubes to ribs and cutting away abdominal walls in large sections and so on.
It really is not any hard question to answer. It is a very, very easy one.
That is not to say that a killer who dismembers and dumps victims in one series and kills other victims in the open streets in another is not a strange killer. He is definitely rare and unexpected - to a degree. But not anywhere as strange and rare as the suggestion of identical twin killers roaming the streets of victorian London and inflicting the same odd damage on their respective victims. That would be a hundred times as unlikely and more. So hiding behind how how a man who only dismembers at times is not common is not going to work.
As I have pointed out before, there are examples of occasional dismemberers, like Miyazaki, the child killer in Japan. He killed four children, and dismembered numbers one and four. In his first murder, he returned to where he had left the body to decompose weeks after the murder and removed the hands and feet to keep as souvenirs. In his second murder, he left the body in the woods like in his first case, but never returned to dismember it, although he had ample opportunity to do so. He dumped his third victim in a parking lot, while he threw her clothes in the woods - so he COULD have dumped her there too - and dismembered her. The fourth victim, he took home and killed and dismembered the body. He then left the body at home, and when it started to decompose very badly, he cut it up in further pieces and dumped the parts all over Tokyo.
So in the first and second case, he was somebody who killed children in the woods and left them lying there.
And in his last case, he killed in the seclusion of his home, and he then dumped the body parts all over Tokyo.
The first two murders therefore looked like they were perpetrated by somebody who perhaps lived nearby the woods and killed there.
The fourth murder looked entirely different - here, we had a man with transportation and who dumped dismembered body parts all over a large metropolis.
If there had been no dismemberment in the first murder, would these murders not resemble the ripper/torso murders to a highly significant degree? Or should I not use the word "significant" here...?
the points of similarities far outweigh the differences. and also agree that serial killers sometimes dismember and sometimes don't and change their MO depending on the circs and escalation. I was trying to be fair to Sam and the naysayers, something that hopefully happens in return, but im not holding my breath!
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