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I'm reposting some of the material on Pitchfork that I put together for the Myth some years ago, as I think it addresses many issues that are being discussed on various threads at the moment.
I'd welcome dicussion on it.
'These few examples show that one must be extremely careful when trying to explain the behaviour of men who murder. It is plainly not good enough for modern criminologists - or Ripperologists - to support a theory as outdated as Macnaghten’s - as many of them do - and perhaps it would be better to say once again that we still simply do not understand the mechanisms that provoke a murderer to murder. As we have just seen a killer can go out and commit brutal murder, with just as much savagery as Jack the Ripper, and then slide back into his normal role in society for as long as six years, before whatever it is that provokes him to murder in the first place occurs again. In fact a killer can stop killing - the Boston Strangler demonstrates that, as does, perversely enough, Colin Pitchfork. The young girls that Pitchfork murdered made the simple mistake of backing away from him, shutting off his all important escape route. If they hadn’t done this he would definitely not have murdered them. He only resorted to murder when the circumstances that he had carefully and painstakingly created to simply expose himself were dramatically altered by the victim’s unusual behaviour. Pitchfork himself admitted this to the police when he told them that he had exposed himself to more than a thousand females but only felt obliged to murder two of them because they ‘provoked’ him to attack - rather than ‘motivated’ him, and this a highly crucial observation to be made in the world of murder and the policing of those crimes. In his own words concerning the first murder:
‘This is the thing I don’t understand about flashing. One per cent of the time you get someone who goes mad and screams and you have to disappear quick. But all the others walk by you. Just walk by you and ignore you. But she turned and ran into a dark footpath. She backed herself into a corner… if she’d walked by, the situation would’ve disappeared.’
And on the second murder:
‘I tried to get ahead. I tried to get set, but she was on top of me. I didn’t even have time to open me bloody trousers. I prefer to do it in a way that satisfies me… they always have room. No matter where I was exposing meself. No matter where. They always have room to walk by me. It’s the easiest way. You shock them. They walk by you and then you got your exit route clear, and go where they come from…’
This second girl also backed herself into a corner, just like the first and died as a result. Pitchfork’s thinking on the subject makes chilling reading, for what he is really saying is: ‘It’s my game. Play it my way and you live. Break the rules, even slightly and you die.’
The problem was that the two young girls didn’t know what game they were playing and didn’t understand the warped rules. There is an important lesson here for police and parent’s in Pitchfork’s confession. After all, if the girls of the area had been advised by their parents, school and local police to simply walk past a ‘flashing’ man and ignore him the tragic deaths may not have occurred.
Obviously we are talking about two very different killers here, Jack the Ripper and Colin Pitchfork, as can be seen from the chapter where various types of serial killers were profiled. Pitchfork clearly belongs to the ‘Duffy’ type of killer who seeks sexual thrill and kills mainly to avoid recognition, however in Pitchfork‘s case this may have been vastly more complicated in that he plainly feared recognition of his true ‘self‘, as a ‘flasher‘, hence his victims who chose to ignore the sight of him exposing himself were patently not recognising him as such, girls who reacted did recognise him and then had to die as a consequence. But Pitchfork can still teach us much about Jack the Ripper - and Thomas Cutbush - for he is also a classic example of a killer who can give up killing and return to a much more mundane criminal act such as exposing himself for two and half years.
Pitchfork can also perhaps help to give us an insight into the mentality of a killer like Jack the Ripper because of the strange ‘trigger’ mechanism that caused him to kill. One can easily imagine that most killers need to be triggered into the act, most often perhaps by a particular victim type who strikes a complicated chord in their weird chemistry, however this was not the case with Pitchfork, the trigger for him was to be recognised for what he was and what he was doing, thus turning him very quickly from a simple and sad flasher to an extremely dangerous and violent individual prepared to murder and mutilate young girls.
It would not be unreasonable to suggest that Jack the Ripper may well had some sort of complicated and ritualised set of trigger mechanisms that ‘provoked’ him to kill, rather than motivated him to kill, and those triggers could have been every bit as simple as Pitchfork’s set of rules.
‘It’s my game. Play it my way and you will live. Break the rules, even slightly, and you die.’
Perhaps his victims recognised him for what he was and what he was doing and then paid a dreadful price for that recognition.
Pitchfork admitted to the police that for eight months after the first murder he committed no offences whatsoever but then started exposing himself again for a further two years and four months before murdering again. This clearly doesn’t fit into any acceptable pattern that has been established by criminologists and psychologists governing the behaviour of killers, but it does clearly and irrefutably demonstrate that Macnaghten’s statement - that ‘It seems, then, highly improbable that the murderer would have suddenly stopped in November ‘88, and been content to recommence operations by merely prodding a girl behind some 2 years and 4 months afterwards ‘ - is patently wrong. One cannot rule out a pattern of behaviour on the part of a serial killer where he commits murder and then later reduces his violence to some lesser offence - like exposing himself, killing sheep instead or stabbing women in the buttocks with a knife.
Moreover it is highly interesting to note that the interval of time given by Macnaghten between ‘his’ last Ripper killing and Cutbush’s reappearance on the streets of London with a knife and Colin Pitchfork’s self admitted gap between murders is exactly the same in both cases: two years and four months. '
I'd welcome dicussion on it.
'These few examples show that one must be extremely careful when trying to explain the behaviour of men who murder. It is plainly not good enough for modern criminologists - or Ripperologists - to support a theory as outdated as Macnaghten’s - as many of them do - and perhaps it would be better to say once again that we still simply do not understand the mechanisms that provoke a murderer to murder. As we have just seen a killer can go out and commit brutal murder, with just as much savagery as Jack the Ripper, and then slide back into his normal role in society for as long as six years, before whatever it is that provokes him to murder in the first place occurs again. In fact a killer can stop killing - the Boston Strangler demonstrates that, as does, perversely enough, Colin Pitchfork. The young girls that Pitchfork murdered made the simple mistake of backing away from him, shutting off his all important escape route. If they hadn’t done this he would definitely not have murdered them. He only resorted to murder when the circumstances that he had carefully and painstakingly created to simply expose himself were dramatically altered by the victim’s unusual behaviour. Pitchfork himself admitted this to the police when he told them that he had exposed himself to more than a thousand females but only felt obliged to murder two of them because they ‘provoked’ him to attack - rather than ‘motivated’ him, and this a highly crucial observation to be made in the world of murder and the policing of those crimes. In his own words concerning the first murder:
‘This is the thing I don’t understand about flashing. One per cent of the time you get someone who goes mad and screams and you have to disappear quick. But all the others walk by you. Just walk by you and ignore you. But she turned and ran into a dark footpath. She backed herself into a corner… if she’d walked by, the situation would’ve disappeared.’
And on the second murder:
‘I tried to get ahead. I tried to get set, but she was on top of me. I didn’t even have time to open me bloody trousers. I prefer to do it in a way that satisfies me… they always have room. No matter where I was exposing meself. No matter where. They always have room to walk by me. It’s the easiest way. You shock them. They walk by you and then you got your exit route clear, and go where they come from…’
This second girl also backed herself into a corner, just like the first and died as a result. Pitchfork’s thinking on the subject makes chilling reading, for what he is really saying is: ‘It’s my game. Play it my way and you live. Break the rules, even slightly and you die.’
The problem was that the two young girls didn’t know what game they were playing and didn’t understand the warped rules. There is an important lesson here for police and parent’s in Pitchfork’s confession. After all, if the girls of the area had been advised by their parents, school and local police to simply walk past a ‘flashing’ man and ignore him the tragic deaths may not have occurred.
Obviously we are talking about two very different killers here, Jack the Ripper and Colin Pitchfork, as can be seen from the chapter where various types of serial killers were profiled. Pitchfork clearly belongs to the ‘Duffy’ type of killer who seeks sexual thrill and kills mainly to avoid recognition, however in Pitchfork‘s case this may have been vastly more complicated in that he plainly feared recognition of his true ‘self‘, as a ‘flasher‘, hence his victims who chose to ignore the sight of him exposing himself were patently not recognising him as such, girls who reacted did recognise him and then had to die as a consequence. But Pitchfork can still teach us much about Jack the Ripper - and Thomas Cutbush - for he is also a classic example of a killer who can give up killing and return to a much more mundane criminal act such as exposing himself for two and half years.
Pitchfork can also perhaps help to give us an insight into the mentality of a killer like Jack the Ripper because of the strange ‘trigger’ mechanism that caused him to kill. One can easily imagine that most killers need to be triggered into the act, most often perhaps by a particular victim type who strikes a complicated chord in their weird chemistry, however this was not the case with Pitchfork, the trigger for him was to be recognised for what he was and what he was doing, thus turning him very quickly from a simple and sad flasher to an extremely dangerous and violent individual prepared to murder and mutilate young girls.
It would not be unreasonable to suggest that Jack the Ripper may well had some sort of complicated and ritualised set of trigger mechanisms that ‘provoked’ him to kill, rather than motivated him to kill, and those triggers could have been every bit as simple as Pitchfork’s set of rules.
‘It’s my game. Play it my way and you will live. Break the rules, even slightly, and you die.’
Perhaps his victims recognised him for what he was and what he was doing and then paid a dreadful price for that recognition.
Pitchfork admitted to the police that for eight months after the first murder he committed no offences whatsoever but then started exposing himself again for a further two years and four months before murdering again. This clearly doesn’t fit into any acceptable pattern that has been established by criminologists and psychologists governing the behaviour of killers, but it does clearly and irrefutably demonstrate that Macnaghten’s statement - that ‘It seems, then, highly improbable that the murderer would have suddenly stopped in November ‘88, and been content to recommence operations by merely prodding a girl behind some 2 years and 4 months afterwards ‘ - is patently wrong. One cannot rule out a pattern of behaviour on the part of a serial killer where he commits murder and then later reduces his violence to some lesser offence - like exposing himself, killing sheep instead or stabbing women in the buttocks with a knife.
Moreover it is highly interesting to note that the interval of time given by Macnaghten between ‘his’ last Ripper killing and Cutbush’s reappearance on the streets of London with a knife and Colin Pitchfork’s self admitted gap between murders is exactly the same in both cases: two years and four months. '
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