Am I too young to be investigating this case

[Sherlock Holmes]

Guys am I too young at 17 to be conducting my own investigation into this case?
Cheers
Mr Holmes

[Robert]

Nope.

[John Wheat]

Certainly Not.

[Inspector Reid]

I agree with them. New blood has new ideas on things.
I'm new around here myself.

[Carol]

Good luck with your investigations! I always enjoy reading about other people's ideas.

Carol (a bit over the hill at 67)

[Errata]

no, but it would be a shame if you filled your days with serial killers and not with fun happy things. You aren't to young to investigate. Just way too young to get obsessed

[Sherlock Holmes]

Thanks guys I was also wanting to set up a deduction board of sorts on here is it possible that this thread could serve that purpose too?
Mr Holmes

[sdreid]

Good luck with your investigations! I always enjoy reading about other people's ideas.

Carol (a bit over the hill at 67)

I'm 67 also and I think I first heard about the case when I was about 2 years old - so 1948? Perhaps I was about 27 before I started seriously studying it though.

[Hunter]

no, but it would be a shame if you filled your days with serial killers and not with fun happy things. You aren't to young to investigate. Just way too young to get obsessed

Good advice, Errata.

I first became seriously interested in this when I was 14, but I had a lot of other interests as well. Still ain't so sure if the interest in girls thing panned out well or not after all these years... LOL.
I don't know though... still been interested in the same girl for over 30 years now, so something seemed to work out.

Still interested in this subject too, but probably not for the same reasons as most people are.

Be careful out there, Sherlock...what I'd give to be your age and still know what I know now. But I rekon there'd be few challenges in life then if that was the case.

[Damaso Marte]

I've been interested in Jack the Ripper since I was very young, something like 10 years old. I was interested in Jack the Ripper long before I ever knew the meaning of the word "prostitute" - for the first 3 years or so of my interest in the case I thought it just meant "poor woman"!

Mostly I rented out Jack the Ripper documentaries from the local Blockbuster video rental store, including one that the BBC did for the 100th anniversary, which is where I first learned about Aaron Kosminski.

But really, I didn't actually know the case until I discovered Casebook in college. I read the entire site (minus the forms) in a series of nights after class. Then I came back a few years later and started lurking on the forums. It was really the forums that taught me about the case: the real discussion of advanced subjects in Ripperology is here. I encourage you to read old threads and take advantage of the great people who post here and know the details of the case down to individual news articles.

I'm now an old man of 27.

[Damaso Marte]

Anyway, in terms of what you can actually add to our understanding of the case:

Most people currently active in Ripperology do one of three things. Some of them add to our knowledge of the case by doing original historical research - finding documents that were previously unknown. This work is still ongoing and plenty of it gets published each year. But I submit that most of the evidence currently being uncovered is secondary or tertiary stuff - information about the background of a witness, about where somebody marginally involved in the case lived in 1900, etc. Nobody's really finding stuff about suspects, police records, etc because these records probably no longer exist.

Other people compile information that's known into reference books. I submit that most of that has been done already, either here at Casebook online or in any of the excellent reference books you can find mentioned in threads here.

Finally, there's what people like me do, which involves the least amount of work. That is, look at the evidence that is available and is compiled, and use it to "tell a story". Since the evidence does not conclusively point in a particular direction, and the input of new evidence is limited, what Ripperology has necessarily descended into is what I like to call "make up a story and debate its plausibility'. One guy says "hey, I think Lechmere was the Ripper", or "I think Eddowes was a copycat", and then the rest of us use logic (and, often, non-logic) to debate how plausible that story is.

I'm a pessimist, so I think we'll just be making up stories and debating their plausibility til kingdom come.

What I think a new generation of math-savvy, computer-savvy ripperologists could do is use statistical social science to better judge the plausibility of stories. For example, you could run a statistical analysis on a dataset containing coded information about serial killings and determine how likely a killer is to change MO's to a given extent, and use that to weigh in on the debate about Stride, Eddowes, or Kelly being a copycat. You could use a similar analysis to determine whether statements such as "facial mutilations suggest a prior relationship between killer and victim" are actually true or are false folk theories.

Prior statistical analysis of the Ripper case is faulty because the people doing it were non-Ripperologists who made certain assumptions about the case, usually they assume that all eyewitnesses are right and all canonical victims (but not Tabram) were killed by the same man. What we need is somebody who can turn statistical social science onto the assumptions themselves and determine how likely it is that a given witness was correct or a given victim was or was not a copycat.

People go to school and get various sorts of degrees in criminology and related fields. People get PhDs in those fields. I bet this kind of statistical analysis gets done elsewhere, we need somebody to bring it here. It would revolutionize this story-telling game we play.

[Steve S]

I was about 13 when I first read Cullen...about 1969........

[K-453]

Hi Sherlock, here's good advice from another newbie (only two years on casebook): When they're nice to you, they're being sarcastic.

[Ginger]

I think I was 14 or so when my mom got the Donald Rumbelow book as part of her book club. Prior to that, my only exposure to the Ripper was that magnificent old Hammer film where he gets squashed by the elevator at the end, and his blood comes bubbling up through the floorboards.

So, no, I don't think you're too young to be studying this. If anything, I think young people today are inappropriately discouraged from meditating on horror and human depravity. An awareness of the nature of evil, and a decision to reject it, is necessary to becoming a well-rounded person.

[Scott Nelson]

You're not too young. The rest of us are too old.