Blameless

[Casebook Wiki Editor]

A serial killer appears to answer their demands... or should that read 'prayers'?
And this is where the heart of the matter doth rest.
For Whitechapel experienced a similar demand from local residents to rid the streets of prostitutes, brothels and gin.
As Jack will tell you, dead women drink no gin.

Hi A.P. - I was browsing through The Ripper File last night and noticed a comment from Dame Henrietta Barnett, wife of the founder of Toynbee Hall, reciting the slang names for gin : "Blue ruin, max, duke, gatter, jacky....."

Jacky ? You thinkin' what I'm thinkin' ?

[Cap'n Jack]

I dunno, DP.
Perhaps it is - and was then - just another long held police prejudice against a minority grouping; and that being the case then some and certain police officers might well view the activities of a serial killer like Sutcliffe as 'just cleaning up the streets' on their behalf.
This in turn produces a half-arsed police investigation, that is until a 'blameless' victim is slain... as the police admitted in the Sutcliffe case.
I think it to be a great lesson to learn that in the Ipswich murders there were two clear links between all the victims: prostitution and drugs.
Prior to the murders there had been several public meetings with the local police and council where local residents demanded that the police should 'clean up the streets by removing the prostitutes and the drugs'.
Hey presto!
A serial killer appears to answer their demands... or should that read 'prayers'?
And this is where the heart of the matter doth rest.
For Whitechapel experienced a similar demand from local residents to rid the streets of prostitutes, brothels and gin.
As Jack will tell you, dead women drink no gin.

[DarkPassenger]

It wasn't that they were to blame because they charged...it was because they charged too much

I think there is a hated of prostitutes culturally because they are making money immorally. Maybe it's envy; most people work legitimately for a living, while prostitutes, through no fault of their own, are forced into a situation where they make money (apparently) through pleasure (although this is not the case, obviously), tax-free. I'm not kidding. It's the backlash of a work ethic using abstract "morality" to take offence at people not working within the ethic; the same phenomenon causes a hatred of benefit claimers.

[Cap'n Jack]

Thanks Malcolm
after the publication of the 'Myth' in 1993, I sent Sutcliffe a registered letter which contained the following ditty - which is on the 3rd page of the book - and nothing else:
'It's a very funny thought
that, if Bears were Bees
They'd build their nests
at the bottom of trees.
And that being so (If the Bees were Bears)
We shouldn't have to
climb up all those stairs.'
(A.A. Milne)
He wasn't able to reply, but then who could?

[Malcolm X]

good posts, Sutcliffe highlights the problems with the Ripper case, it's a very good example to use in most arguements..... as is Bundy too.

the police had no idea, but this is maybe because none of the suspect descriptions were accurate enough/ none of them truly matched and maybe the ripper was never seen............. i dont think it's police incompetence quite as much as Sutcliffe was; but it still shows you how hard it is to catch a serial killer

[Cap'n Jack]

Thanks Sara
one has also to consider that many of the most highly rated writers and researchers in this strange field cling fanatically onto the words of the most senior police officials at the time of the Whitechapel Murders; and then these writers and reseachers proclaim these words as some kind of holy truth... just because they were spoken by the most senior police officials involved.
But the Yorkshire Ripper case does show us once and for all that it is the most senior police officials who haven't the slightest clue what is really going on, and are most likely to lead us in a totally false direction with their ill-founded and completely erroneous thoughts on suspects.
Just because a couple of senior police officials imply that the Whitechapel Murderer was a Jew, it doesn't mean to say he was, because quite honestly they didn't have a clue, just like the Yorkshire Ripper being a Geordie... by heck!
I believe we should turn this thing upside down and create a new formula that dictates the higher the rank of the police official involved then the less he actually knew.

[Sara]

A good post, and it still beggars belief that Sutcliffe wasn't caught much sooner.

But what that does show, is how both the fragmented and the heirarchical nature of police work, in those days at least, mitigated against finding a killer. Police in the past have always been reluctant to cooperate with other forces. Just as importantly, when a senior policeman gets a bee in his bonnet it can throw an entire enquiry off course. I believe that's what happened with the Sutcliffe case - the obsession with the tapes did for those girls.

It doesn't excuse police stupidity though. The awful thing is, now that senior police are taken in at Graduate level, we have another kind of stupidity going on... namely social engineering and political correctness.

The 'open-minded policeman' has for too long been an oxymoron...

[Cap'n Jack]

'Blameless'

Studying the Yorkshire Ripper murders in further detail, and how the modern police force of the UK approached those crimes, I was profoundly struck by the police description of the victims when they were not working prostitutes, but rather students or the like.
The senior police officers described such victims as 'blameless', implicitly implying as such by proxy that the working prostitutes who formed the majority of the victims were not 'blameless' but in fact to be blamed for their own savage murder and mutilation.
The vast majority of women have sex one assumes, so should a woman who charges for sex be treated any differently than any other woman, especially when it comes to a serious murder investigation?
I don't think so, apart that is from 'Wilson' world, where many here do live.
In fact I believe this shows a clear intention on the part of senior police officers in the UK to sweeten up such despicable crimes against women, simply because they are working prostitutes... and this is massively clear from the efforts made by the police in all of the major investigations into the murder of prostitutes from the long distant Whitechapel Murders, through the Yorkshire Ripper and then right up to the recent Ipswich murders.
In the 'Myth', back in 1993, I noted that Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, had been flagged five times in the card index cross reference system used by the police at the time, and I stated then that it was impossible to believe that the police did not respond to the information under their control, as five flags in such a system must indicate a serious suspect, when not the killer himself.
I now discover that Sutcliffe was in fact flagged a total of ten times in that system which can only mean one thing: he was the killer.
But the senior police officers in the case, refusing to acknowledge their own information systems, pursued a completely different suspect, much to the horror of the junior officers on the street who had interviewed Sutcliffe and firmly believed him to be the killer.
There is a clear alienation process at work here in the minds of the senior police officers involved in the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper; and I believe that process to be available in the hunt for the Whitechapel Murderer as well.
In other words it couldn't be one of us, but must be one of 'them', a Jew, Johnny Foreigner or even a Geordie... just as long as he wasn't from our patch, because if he was we should have caught him by now, so to explain the obvious we create a myth, a serial killer who is invisible to all.
I firmly believe that this is what exactly happened in the hunt for the Whitechapel Murderer, that the real killer was right under their noses the whole time while the Yard chased Jews down Roadside.