The Paris Torso Mystery

[Fleetwood Mac]

There are many common misunderstandings about the series of Torsos found over a near 30 year period in the London area, and the forthcoming book will cover those cases in far greater detail, than any previous book on the subject.

What is the relevance to the discussion on this thread? It seems you're suggesting that there is some information somewhere, which nobody on this thread has seen and analysed for reasoning skills, and that information will render this discussion academic. In the event you have some information that is useful, then put it forward rather than appeal to magic.

It's probably worth pointing out that knowing a lot about the Whitechapel Murders, or the Torso Murders, does not automatically demand that we give credit to people's reasoning skills and ability to interpret source documents.

The people who put the effort in to unearth source documents for the rest of us to pour over, deserve all of the credit in the world given that we wouldn't have the luxury of pouring over them otherwise. That does not extend to writing books. Credit would be given depending upon their ability to reasonably interpret source documents: you (general you) could know every aspect in miniature, but without the reasoning skills and ability to interpret source documents, then your (general your) book is not going to amount to very much.

Different skills and effort: research versus the ability to reason.

It doesn't follow that someone who undertakes both research and writing books, doesn't have both skills; at the same time, it doesn't follow that someone who has undertaken a lot of research or knows a lot, can write a well reasoned book. You (general you) need to see the evidence that the author holds interpreting source documents and reasoning skills. A second-hand: "wait for this, it's gonna be earth-shattering news" is not remotely approaching evidence.

In the event the purpose of this book is to compare the WM with the TM, then I can tell you now that the author needs to do two things to render it credible:

1) Look at current research. The research undertaken by people who have studied sexual serial murders. The author cannot draw a comparison without understanding what sexual serial murderers do and why.

2) Do not go down the road of: "removal of limbs = cannot be same person"; "bodies thrown in the river = can't be the same person"; "the doctors and the police thought it was two different men and so it must have been". The reason being that the doctors and police had no knowledge to guide them, and the research undertaken by people who have actually looked at these types of murders, does not conform to such simplistic and uninformed views.

There has been research posted on this thread, i.e. analysed their crimes, empirical data. It counts for far more than what the general public, who have never studied these types of crimes, imagine.

That research, looking at 762 cases of sexual serial murder, concluded that removal of limbs, carving on a victim and evisceration; are all forms of dismemberment underpinned by the same desire/psychology/motive. The authors called for further research, which tells us that they'd like to see other researchers confirm their conclusion. But, at the very least, it should make those people parroting outdated, simplistic notions such as: "limbs removed = cannot bet the same person", stop and think.

I agree with Christer in that your appeal to some information somewhere that nobody has seen, is of no use to this thread. I'll add my take and say that it's a load of words taking up space for no good reason. A bit like having old kettles and hoovers in your car boot or garden shed that you meant to take to the skip but you (general you) never got 'round to it.

[Elamarna]

There are many common misunderstandings about the series of Torsos found over a near 30 year period in the London area, and the forthcoming book will cover those cases in far greater detail, than any previous book on the subject.

At this point I have no idea what conclusions will be reached by the author, as the work is not completed.

Why my preferred candidate is brought into the debate is puzzling. The author of the book does not share my views.

Steve

[Herlock Sholmes]

My in-depth analysis.

Ripper - killed in the streets, bodies left on display and not dismembered.

Torso killer - stored and killed indoors, dismembered, wrapped, parts distributed and chucked in the river at different locations.

Two different men.

[Fisherman]

I really would suggest people await what will I suggest be the definitive study of the Thames Torsos due out next year.
I have seen draft versions and it will certainly address many of the misunderstandings and genuine questions I note in this thread and others on the same subject.

Too many questionable claims and interpretations it seems are simply accepted as fact.



Steve

To all of the people who feel entitled to carry on the discussion without waiting for - and subsequenly accepting as gospel - Suzie Huntingtons book: Just do so.

If the book, when it arrives, is the ”definitive study” of the torso cases, laying down the facts, and not another book speculating about the possibilities involved according to the authors take on things, then itīs publication would be the time to end all discussion, not now.

Steven Blomers take on things when it comes to the torso cases, is -oddly enough - that the abdomens cut open from groin to sternum, the taken away abdominal walls, the excised uteri, the stolen rings, the prostitute victims, the skilled cutting, the slit throats, are not similarities between the series. They are instead ”issues”.

Of course, they are and remain similarities even if the book to end all discussion would be able to prove that they had different motivations (and I think that will be impossible to do) in between the two series. Similarities are similarities, regardless if they are not true similarities. But in an earlier exchange between us, Steven Blomer denied this. Issues, that is what they are, not similarities, he said.

If he had been a tad more discerning, he would have said that he thought that there was potentially reasons to suggest that the similarities were perhaps not real similarities. That would be another matter, and one that it is perfectly legit to suggest. And then he would have to prove his point, similarity by similarity: Coincidence, coincidence, coincidence, coincidence, coincidence …

Fine by me, if he can do it. I would be grateful to have the factual solution proven. Until that happens, though, it applies that similarities point to a common originator, more so if the similarities are of a rare - or as in this case, extremely rare - character.

It is often said, as is evident from the Rookie Detectives latest post, that I am not to be trusted, since I have a bias towards a not named suspect. In Steven Blomers case, he is a keen advocate of the polish Anderson suspect, normally named as Aaron Kosminski.

It is reasoned that this suspect was a man of psychological frailty, who in the autumn of 1888 prowled the streeets of Whitechapel and killed prostitutes, possibly under episodes of psychosis.

What most people would agree about is that Aaron Kosminski is anything but likely to have had access to a bolthole and a horse and cart, and so, much as he can be dressed up as the Ripper, he is much less likely to have been the Torso killer.

Bias is not something I invented or perfected, for that matter. It is all around.

And now, to all of you, a Merry Christmas. Lets hope that ”the definitive book on the Torso killings” is met by unanimous cheers and an unfaltering support by all of us. It would be the best outcome possible. Good luck to the author - and I mean that wholeheartedly!

[Herlock Sholmes]

Suzie Huntington,

I have read some of the drafts, and it covers all the torsos from 1870s onwards.
It's a very well referenced and researched work.

Steve

I thought that it was Suzie but I wasn’t sure Steve.

Cheers.

[Elamarna]

Remind me who is writing that book Steve?

Suzie Huntington,

I have read some of the drafts, and it covers all the torsos from 1870s onwards.
It's a very well referenced and researched work.

Steve

[Herlock Sholmes]

I really would suggest people await what will I suggest be the definitive study of the Thames Torsos due out next year.
I have seen draft versions and it will certainly address many of the misunderstandings and genuine questions I note in this thread and others on the same subject.

Too many questionable claims and interpretations it seems are simply accepted as fact.



Steve

Remind me who is writing that book Steve?

[Elamarna]

I really would suggest people await what will I suggest be the definitive study of the Thames Torsos due out next year.
I have seen draft versions and it will certainly address many of the misunderstandings and genuine questions I note in this thread and others on the same subject.

Too many questionable claims and interpretations it seems are simply accepted as fact.



Steve

[The Rookie Detective]

I am going to spend as little time on this as possible, so I will give you an answer and then withdraw from the thread.

To put things simple - and that is what you do - you are saying that once a headless body is dumped in a public place, we can be more or less certain that the missing head tells us that the killer had an intention to hide the identity of the victim.

This is an interpretation that runs into all sorts of problems once we look at the torso murders.

1. The victims of the torso killer had moles and scars left on the body parts that were found, some of them in water, some on dry land. Therefore, the killer had not taken all the necessary precautions to obscure the identities of his victims, and sure enough, this was how Liz Jackson was identified.

2. The killer apparently did not throw body parts in the Thames with the intention of hiding what he had done. Instead, just about all the parts thrown in the river floated ashore. There were four victims in the canonical tally, and so even if the killer somehow thought that they would not float ashore but instead sink, he would find out that they did not do so. Regardless of this, he carried on. A reasonable conclusion was that he intended for the parts to be found. No effort was made in any case to weigh the parts down. And why put parts on land if he thought that throwing them in the river made them disappear?

3. The main disposal method of the parts was to chuck them in the river. If he did the same to the heads, they would sink. That would not mean that it must have been about hiding identities, only that the heads did not float.

4. We know for certain that Jackson had her uterus excised from her body, bundled up and thrown in the Thames. We therefore have an evisceration killer on our hands. Some will say ”but that is the one time he did that!”, but that is not any certainty at all. Contrary to that idea, we actually know that there were organs missing in other cases too, like the heart and lungs from the Rainham victim. They were ”absent” from the thoraxic cavity, so they had either fallen out of the body all on their own - or they had been removed by the killer. If we want to make an informed guess about their fate, we need to include more information about Liz Jackson. She too had her lungs and heart missing from the thoraxic cavity, but in her case, the examining doctor stated that they had been removed, not just that they were absent. Once we know with certainty that this was what happened in the Jackson case, it must weigh in heavily when assessing the Rainham ditto. We know that this killer was into cutting hearts and lungs out from his victims bodies, and so that was with great likelihood what happened in the Rainham case too.
Now, how and why does this have a bearing on the missing head issue? It has a bearing because we can tell that we are dealing with an eviscerator, an aggressive mutilator. It therefore applies that we may conclude that the dismemberments would in all likelihood also have been of an aggressive character. This is supported by other factors too, like how we can see that before the killer divided the trunks up in three parts in the Rainham and Jackson cases, he cut their abdomens open all the way down. This gave him access to the organs of the body, and we know that some of them went lost in the process.
We can therefore make an excellent case for all of the cuts and dismemberments having been part of aggressive mutilations and dismemberments, and that would entail all parts, including the heads.
Once the heads were cut off, they could have been thrown in the Thames and disappeared. Equally, they can have been kept as trophies or as sex toys (see what I wrote in an above post about Edmund Kemper!).
When it comes to hiding the identity by way of taking the head of, it cannot be ruled out in cases of aggressive dismemberment - any such killer may of course have wanted to have his victims unidentified, and to that end, he may have spirited the heads away. But if it was so, then it was not the reason for cutting the head off in the first place, but instead a secondary weighing up, a fringe benefit if you will. But if it had all been about obscuring the identity and nothing else, the eviscerations and the cuts to the abdomens would become unexplicable, just as it would be very odd for such a killer to intentionally see to it that the body parts from his exploits were found along the shores of the Thames, no moles, tattoos or scars having been removed. And to boot, one of the victims was found wrapped in clothing with a name written inside it!

The commonest reason for dismemberment murders is a wish to hide what has been done, or a wish to hide an identity. In such cases, however, there are no eviscerations and no bellies cut open from sternum to groin. Nor are name-marked clothes left on the body of the victims, and scars, tattoos and moles are typically cut away if there is an intention to hide the identity. Nowadays, the hands or fingers are also removed to disenable finger printing. That was not a problem back in 1887-89, though.

So, that is what I have always said, and now I have said it again: Those who claim that the torso murders were typical dismemberment murders, only intending to hide the identity of the victims, are effectively proven wrong by the elements involved. It is only as a secondary matter that hiding the identities of the victims can have come into play, and we therefore have a killer who is on equal terms with the aggressive mutilations carried out in both the Torso and the Ripper series. Ergo, given the tremendous rarity of these kinds of deeds, we may be resonably certain that we are dealing with just the one killer.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. May it bring wisdom, insights and a few toddies.

Christer raises some valid points.

When you combine MUTILATIONS and DISMEMBERMENT, it indicates rather conclusively that a degree of enjoyment and gratification was had by the offender.

This does not reflect a person trying to hide the identification of a victim because they had to; ergo, defensive dismemberment.

The mutilations of the Torso victims are what gives us an insight into the killer's mindset at the time.

He may (or may not) have intended for his victims to never be IDENTIFIED, but he had every intention of them being DISCOVERED.

And that's the point right there. Not only did he intend for them to be DISCOVERED; Pinchin St and Whitehall Torso PROVE this, he supposedly encroached into the heart of JTR territory by DELIBERATELY dumping a torso in Pinchin St.

That leaves us with some possibilities...

1) He deliberately dumped the torso of one of his victims in Pinchin St to show off and make a statement that he could go anywhere he wanted, even in JTR stomping ground.

2) He and Jack the Ripper BOTH operated in the same area, but the Torso killer used a wider area of London.

3) He and Jack the Ripper were the same man.


Now IF we exclude the Pinchin Street Torso as a Torso killer victim, it supports the killers being different men.

But by attributing the Pinchin St torso to the Torso Killer, and NOT JTR, then it only leaves us with the 3 options I listed above.


Those who believe they were different men, by proxy then have to explain how the Pinchin St torso came to be dumped in the heart of Ripper territory.

IF the Torso killer had never dumped any Torsos in JTR territory, then the argument they are different men is strengthened. BUT, the Pinchin Torso WAS dumped in the East End and that is a fact that can't be dismissed.

To say that the Torso killer didn't operate in the same area as JTR is FALSE. The Pinchin Street torso PROVES that the Torso Killer was literally in that area.

Therefore, when you add the Pinchin St torso to the deliberate mutilations of the victims, including the injuries inflicted on Jackson, then the comparisons are there.

I understand how some may have an issue with the subjectivity of some of Christer's past posts relating to his favoured suspect (that I won't name for obvious reasons) and possibly even the tone of some of his posts, but I feel we need to look at Christer's views on this without the preconceptions of his favored suspect muddying the waters so to speak.

On THIS particular thread, I believe Christer is correct in his views.
I also find it commendable that Christer has kept to his word and refrained from mentioning the suspect who must not be named...(no, it's not Voldemort!)

Now...

The key here is that the Torso Killer made a MISTAKE when the body of Elizabeth Jackson was IDENTIFIED.

We have to make a clear distinction between DISCOVERY and IDENTIFCATION.

A defensive dismemberer intends to CONCEAL BOTH

An offensive dismemberer intends for only the IDENTIFICATION of his victims to be concealed, but wants the bodies to be DISCOVERED.


The Torso killer was an offensive dismemberer because he also MUTILATED his victims, which then aligns more with the Ripper, who ALSO MUTILATED.

The Ripper also tried and failed to DECAPITATE MORE THAN ONE of his victims
The Ripper also obliterated Kelly's face...in an outrageous attempt for her to NOT BE IDENTIFIED.

To summarize...

Because BOTH the Ripper and Torso killer MUTILATED, and BOTH ATTEMPTED a degree of DISMEMBERMENT, plus the Pinchin Street Torso dumped on RIPPER stomping ground, plus the mutilations inflicted on Jackson being similar to an already established victim of the Ripper, then the similarities are there.

Ask yourselves this question...

IF the Ripper has been successful in taking Kelly's and Chapman's heads off, would that suggest that the Ripper and the Torso killer were the same man.

Did the Ripper's failure to take Kelly's head act as a catalyst for him to abort his attempts to dismember OUTSIDE of his workshop/private cutting room?

And have we been fooled by the idea that Kelly must have been the Ripper's last victim because she suffered the most compared to the others, when she may have got off lightly compared to his other victims, one of which he dumped in Pinchin St?

Did he get disturbed as he was trying to decapitate Kelly?

Is the 135-year-old idea that he had all the time in the world with Kelly, completely wrong?


Lots to ponder


RD

[Fisherman]

No.

I cannot.

And I am surprised that you seem to think that the examples you gave of murderers decapitating their victims for other reasons are in any way relevant.

Not a single one of the cases you cited was of a murderer having dumped a headless body in a public place.

I am going to spend as little time on this as possible, so I will give you an answer and then withdraw from the thread.

To put things simple - and that is what you do - you are saying that once a headless body is dumped in a public place, we can be more or less certain that the missing head tells us that the killer had an intention to hide the identity of the victim.

This is an interpretation that runs into all sorts of problems once we look at the torso murders.

1. The victims of the torso killer had moles and scars left on the body parts that were found, some of them in water, some on dry land. Therefore, the killer had not taken all the necessary precautions to obscure the identities of his victims, and sure enough, this was how Liz Jackson was identified.

2. The killer apparently did not throw body parts in the Thames with the intention of hiding what he had done. Instead, just about all the parts thrown in the river floated ashore. There were four victims in the canonical tally, and so even if the killer somehow thought that they would not float ashore but instead sink, he would find out that they did not do so. Regardless of this, he carried on. A reasonable conclusion was that he intended for the parts to be found. No effort was made in any case to weigh the parts down. And why put parts on land if he thought that throwing them in the river made them disappear?

3. The main disposal method of the parts was to chuck them in the river. If he did the same to the heads, they would sink. That would not mean that it must have been about hiding identities, only that the heads did not float.

4. We know for certain that Jackson had her uterus excised from her body, bundled up and thrown in the Thames. We therefore have an evisceration killer on our hands. Some will say ”but that is the one time he did that!”, but that is not any certainty at all. Contrary to that idea, we actually know that there were organs missing in other cases too, like the heart and lungs from the Rainham victim. They were ”absent” from the thoraxic cavity, so they had either fallen out of the body all on their own - or they had been removed by the killer. If we want to make an informed guess about their fate, we need to include more information about Liz Jackson. She too had her lungs and heart missing from the thoraxic cavity, but in her case, the examining doctor stated that they had been removed, not just that they were absent. Once we know with certainty that this was what happened in the Jackson case, it must weigh in heavily when assessing the Rainham ditto. We know that this killer was into cutting hearts and lungs out from his victims bodies, and so that was with great likelihood what happened in the Rainham case too.
Now, how and why does this have a bearing on the missing head issue? It has a bearing because we can tell that we are dealing with an eviscerator, an aggressive mutilator. It therefore applies that we may conclude that the dismemberments would in all likelihood also have been of an aggressive character. This is supported by other factors too, like how we can see that before the killer divided the trunks up in three parts in the Rainham and Jackson cases, he cut their abdomens open all the way down. This gave him access to the organs of the body, and we know that some of them went lost in the process.
We can therefore make an excellent case for all of the cuts and dismemberments having been part of aggressive mutilations and dismemberments, and that would entail all parts, including the heads.
Once the heads were cut off, they could have been thrown in the Thames and disappeared. Equally, they can have been kept as trophies or as sex toys (see what I wrote in an above post about Edmund Kemper!).
When it comes to hiding the identity by way of taking the head of, it cannot be ruled out in cases of aggressive dismemberment - any such killer may of course have wanted to have his victims unidentified, and to that end, he may have spirited the heads away. But if it was so, then it was not the reason for cutting the head off in the first place, but instead a secondary weighing up, a fringe benefit if you will. But if it had all been about obscuring the identity and nothing else, the eviscerations and the cuts to the abdomens would become unexplicable, just as it would be very odd for such a killer to intentionally see to it that the body parts from his exploits were found along the shores of the Thames, no moles, tattoos or scars having been removed. And to boot, one of the victims was found wrapped in clothing with a name written inside it!

The commonest reason for dismemberment murders is a wish to hide what has been done, or a wish to hide an identity. In such cases, however, there are no eviscerations and no bellies cut open from sternum to groin. Nor are name-marked clothes left on the body of the victims, and scars, tattoos and moles are typically cut away if there is an intention to hide the identity. Nowadays, the hands or fingers are also removed to disenable finger printing. That was not a problem back in 1887-89, though.

So, that is what I have always said, and now I have said it again: Those who claim that the torso murders were typical dismemberment murders, only intending to hide the identity of the victims, are effectively proven wrong by the elements involved. It is only as a secondary matter that hiding the identities of the victims can have come into play, and we therefore have a killer who is on equal terms with the aggressive mutilations carried out in both the Torso and the Ripper series. Ergo, given the tremendous rarity of these kinds of deeds, we may be resonably certain that we are dealing with just the one killer.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. May it bring wisdom, insights and a few toddies.

[Fiver]

What do the abbreviations you use refer to? For example, WM? Should I read it as "Whitechapel Murders"?
And OP?…

OP is Opening Post or Original Post - the first post on a thread.

[Fiver]

Even today, opinions are still divided, although the majority seems to believe that both series of murders were committed by the same perpetrator.
Regarding the works dealing with the Thames Torso Killer:

• "The Thames Torso Murders of Victorian London" by R. Michael Gordon, McFarland & Company (2002): According to the author, Jack the Ripper and the Thames Torso Killer are one and the same person, namely George Chapman, alias Seweryn Antonowicz Klosowski, a Polish serial killer whom some police officers of the time suspected could be the Whitechapel murderer.

• "The Thames Torso Murders" by M. J. Trow, Wharncliffe (2011): According to the author, Jack the Ripper and the Thames Torso Killer are two different killers, but he does not propose a suspect's name for either. In the final chapter, he merely suggests that the Torso Killer could be one of the many cat's meat men who roamed the streets of the East End.

• "Jack and the Thames Torso Murders: A New Ripper?" by Drew Gray and Andrew Wise, Amberley Publishing (2019): According to the authors, Jack the Ripper and the Thames Torso Killer are one and the same person, namely James Hardiman (1859-1891), a cat's meat man who lived in the Whitechapel area, not far from the Ripper's murders.

• "Cutting Point: Solving the Jack the Ripper and the Thames Torso Murders" by Christer Holmgren, Timaios Press (2021): According to the author, Jack the Ripper and the Thames Torso Killer are one and the same person, namely Charles Allen Lechmere.

Personally, I tend to believe that they are two different murderers. But that's just my opinion.

Those books represent the opinions of their authors, not the majority opinion. They often make their cases by selectively quoting witnesses, stating assumptions as facts, and ignoring points that contradict their theories.

The Torso cases were examined by the police and by doctors. None of them concluded that the Torso Killer and the Ripper were the same person. A more modern example comes from the Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling in 2005, which concludes that the Pinchin Street Torso was not a Ripper victim.

Getting back to Dr Hebbert, he concluded that the Torso Killer was skilled in separating limbs at the joints, like a butcher or slaughterer. This conclusion contradicts the theories presented in the books you list. Obviously, driving a delivery van or cutting hair did not involve separating limbs at the joints. Neither did being a cat's meat man. They purchased boiled meat from the horse slaughters. There probably would have been some fat or gristle, but slaughterers had separated the meat from the hair, hide, bones, hooves, and organs before the meat was sold. A cat's meat man never had to separate a joint, didn't have to know anything about anatomy, and didn't even have to deal with raw meat as part of their job. Eating a piece of fried chicken would teach you more about anatomy than being a cat's meat man.

That said, there are indications that James Hardiman may have also been a a horse slaughterer. But there's not one shred of evidence trying him or any of the other suspects from these books to any of the Torso cases.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

Now that you know all of this - and there are more decapitators who made no effort at all to try and hide the identities of their victims - maybe you can conceive another explanation for decapitation than hiding the identity in the Thames Torso case too?

No.

I cannot.

And I am surprised that you seem to think that the examples you gave of murderers decapitating their victims for other reasons are in any way relevant.

Not a single one of the cases you cited was of a murderer having dumped a headless body in a public place.

[PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR 1]

oh yes they did.

Oh no they did not.

[Abby Normal]

* We don't know the identities of most of the Torso victims, so we don't know if there is a common victimology.
* Not the same time frame. The Ripper was active for a few months. Torsoman was active for years, possibly decades.
* Not the same general location. The Ripper was active in a small part of East London. The Torsoman left bodies for miles up and down the Thames.
* We don't have the heads of the Torso victims, so we have no idea if the face was targeted. The Ripper mutilated the soft tissues of the torso. Torsoman severed the spines.
* The Torsoman did not pose the bodies or organs.
* The Ripper took organs and possessions as trophies. We have no idea if the Torsoman did.
* Clearly the Torsoman did not use a ruse to get the victims to the places he left their bodies. The Ripper may have used a ruse, but we can't be certain.
* The series of murders did not start or end at the same time.

Au Contreir Mon Freir!

*the one we do know was an unfortunate. not a stretch so were the rest. especially since no one came forward to id the rest. a common but sad trait with prostitutes.
*same time frame. within a couple years and pinchin during.
*same location. within walking distance and pinchin again.
*wrong. the tottenham head was displayed intentionally and has the same mutilations as eddowes.
*torsoman did in fact pose, or display his bodies and parts. read up were they were found.
*were talking about possessions, trophies. they both took rings. and torsoman very well could have taken away body parts too since not all were found no?
*unless you think torsoman told his victims he was going to murder them and cut them up back at his place and his victims went along with that wilingly then obviously he used a ruse.
*oh yes they did. one could argue when torsomans started but who cares? serial killers can go decades dormant. and they most certainly ended at the same time. pinchin and mckenzie.

sorry fiver, but you are quite wrong.