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Posted: 21-06-2004 20:47 Post subject: Jack the Ripper II

This is the second part of the long Jack the Ripper thread.

It is designed as a fresh start as the previous thread was unwieldy. Before posting we recommend you familiarise yourself with previous arguements by looking through the thread (use the Index below) and/or visit the casebook

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Index

To help people catch up with information and/or find something they are looking for we have preapred an index:

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Fiction
.....A Study in Terror

Protagonists
.....Cornwell, Patricia
.....Marriot, Trevor

Reading Recommendations
.....Cornwall, Hugo
.....FraterLibre

Groups
.....Masons
.....Royals

Suspects
.....Cream, Thomas Neill
.....Kelly, James

Websites
.....??
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NB: This is a work in progress so if you think a link to an important post is missing then feel free to contact a mod with the link to the post and a suggestion of where it should go - they will decide if it fits in and edit this post accordingly.

Emps

Posted: 21-06-2004 21:59 Post subject:

I'd like to thank Emps for the Augean task of sorting the hell that was the JtR MkI thread into some form of order.

Hell of a job, old thing!

Posted: 21-06-2004 22:11 Post subject:

Posted: 21-06-2004 23:28 Post subject:

Perhaps now key contributors to that thread or indeed contributors to this new thread should inform others of their views on the matter?

Sort of so we know where we're all at?

Last edited by Guest on 22-06-2004 16:33; edited 1 time in total

Suspect - James Kelly, or someone very similar. White, British, more or less the same class as his victims, history of abusive behaviour toward the 'fallen' class of women, with some history of violent crime. Lived and worked inthe area. Was nearly 30 at the time of the murders.

Number of victims - of the canonical victims, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly certainly. There is a logical(!) progression in the injuries of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman to Eddowes and Kelly, but I feel that the resemblances are not that compelling. So really only 2 of the 5 I feel are 'Jack', with Nichols and Chapman also having a common but distinct hand. Stride was a domestic.

Secondary suspect: none... JtR never actually existed, the yellow press having engendered a number of 'copy cat' opportunist murders, allow people to settle scores and hope that Jack would be blamed Smile

Jack the Ripper - Born into existence with the Dear Boss letter. An invention of the press, a name given to encompass several losely related murders. The work of dockworkers or their ilk, trying to rekindle the flames of revolution which had exploded on the streets of London just the year before with Bloody Sunday in Trafalgar Square for which many held Charles Warren accountable.

The writing on the wall and the lipski intervention give notable intent. The unnamable culprit for fear of action, the police outwitting the press by falsely reporting that the killer had moved abroad since the presentation of ANY culprit would have kicked off what had happened only the year before.

The writing on the wall, the straw that broke the camels back and Warren realised he was in a stalemate so he resigned. If he'd presented a jewish person, there would be racial riots, if he'd presented a doctor or a member of the upper classes, there would have been riots, if he'd presented a dockworker, there would have been riots. Only one way out, resignation. The killings stop...only to start again a month or so later where possibly a solitary murder tries to ride on the coat tails of the previous murders. And then it stops.

No canonical victims, merely victims of circumstance, of history, of action. Casualties of an all together different war.

Posted: 22-06-2004 12:53 Post subject:

My tuppence worth......

The evidence points to the existence of a psychopathic murderer of strangers active in east London in the summer and autumn of 1888. We would nowadays recognise this individual as a "serial killer".

Using the well-regarded and consistently accurate system of psychological profiling, we can state that the killer was likely to have been a man in his late twenties or thereabouts, to have experienced a childhood marked by traumas that affected the development of his sexuality, and to have a history of violence, possibly directed against animals in his youth.

The close proximity of the murder sites, the way in which four of the attacks were carried out and the escalating levels of violence are all consistent with the theory that one individual was responsible.

Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Kate Eddowes and Mary Kelly were all killed by the same hand, and the Ripper may well have been responsible for the murders of Martha Tabram, Liz Stride and others.

He is extremely unlikely to be among the suspects identified to date, although William Henry Bury is a better bet than most.

When consdering the evidence it is important to separate facts pointing to the existence of a killer from the media circus which accompanied the murders.

Posted: 22-06-2004 13:55 Post subject:

Here's my take -

JtR was a murderer, perhaps also a sadist, who seemed to have some psychological problems with women. All candidates for his true identity thuse far are speculative, as are the reasons for the murders being committed. All of the prosaic theories about what went on arose simply because he wasn't caught - various imaginations have rushed in to fill the 'what if...?' void. This is probably painting it in a much more florid way than is actually the case. Sex killers in later years did equally strange things on occasion with their victims, but because they were caught, we have a better understanding about why they committed such acts. We don't have that luxury with JtR - hence all of the various claims and theories. Few seem to want to grasp the possibility that he was simply a sex killer along similar lines of those who came along later, and who didn't have any big scheme or big plan. They just had their own, somewhat bizarre modus operandi.

Posted: 26-06-2004 16:54 Post subject:

While this thread is going in no particular direction I thought I’d mention a couple of general points that have always niggled a bit but for which I never found an appropriate point to post on the old one. I’m not responding to anything anyone else has posted - just commenting on some received wisdom that always makes me feel a little uneasy.

It appears to me that the general conception of the Victorian East-End at night tends to be overly influenced by the way that it is portrayed in film and fiction - dark, silent and almost completely deserted. Even a little reading around the subject suggests that this is a complete fallacy. Many factories, large and small, were operational for twenty-four hours a day. Foundries, kilns and boilers were not shut down overnight and even if a workplace ceased operation in the hours of darkness there would be a substantial number of workers employed overnight to guard, maintain and manage them. And the busiest docks the world has ever known didn’t just grind to a halt at six.

On top of this you had a massive problem with overpopulation. Some rooms were occupied on a shift system so that two or even three families or groups might call the same place home - those who were waiting on their turn would have to be somewhere - either working or maybe more likely loafing around the streets. The East-End of London was a twenty-four hour place and although I’m not suggesting that it’s streets were a seething mass of humanity during the hours of darkness they certainly wouldn’t have been deserted.

Of course although this image might not be as atmospheric as the one Elstree or Hollywood depict it actually adds to the mystery of how the murderer (or murderers) got away with so much without detection.

Prostitution - I’ve seen it proposed that the police and the public, at least to start with, weren’t terribly concerned about the murders because the victims were prostitutes. I’ve read at least one statistic that suggests that one in four women in the Whitechapel area had worked as prostitutes. However the bulk of these were women who treated it as a part-time or stop-gap profession to be fallen back on only when times were harder than normal. In these circumstances the gap between “us” and “them” would have been far less noticeable than it would be now - as might be indicated by the outpourings of popular sympathy at the funerals of Polly Nichols and Kate Eddowes. I suspect the anathema with which the more genteel citizens of Victorian London and indeed our own age treat prostitutes was far less noticeable in the East-End itself. Your rear-echelon police executive might have viewed the victims as whores first and victims second but I suspect the average peeler on the beat didn’t see the victims as operating outside of normal society as much we might assume.

I’ve also seen it implied many times that Whitechapel was some sort of no-go area for the forces of law and was poorly policed. This seems really odd to me. Within five minutes of being discovered Polly Nichols body was found independently by a policeman while the original discoverer was round the corner soliciting the services of another copper. The bodies of Annie Chapman and Mary Kelly were attended by policemen within twenty minutes of being found. Within sixteen minutes of discovery Liz Stride's body had been attended by two policeman and a doctor and Catherine Eddowes was virtually tripped over by a copper on his beat. I have absolutely no evidence to back this up but I don’t think I’d be risking much if I were to bet that these response times are comparable to, if not better than, those of modern London.

As to their efficiency or otherwise there are other people here who have read far more than I have on the subject but I have to say that from what I have read the police, with the material and resources available to them, don’t seem to have made as much of a balls-up of the investigation as is often suggested. A series of apparently motiveless crimes perpetrated in an enormous, overpopulated city and with no recourse to anything but the most basic forensic science - lets face it the police were always going to need a very large dose of luck to solve this one, no matter how diligently they dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.

Comparing the actions of the Victorian police with those searching for Jack’s namesake nearly a century later in Yorkshire I have to say I think I’d prefer the old boys on my side. It’s also quite interesting to compare the attitudes to the victims in both cases - our capacity for empathy seems to have nose-dived in the period between the two. Depressing really.

Posted: 26-06-2004 18:41 Post subject:

Posted: 26-06-2004 18:56 Post subject:

Posted: 12-07-2004 14:41 Post subject:

Its an odd article as they don't really make a good case for why they changed their opinion (and I suspect it was a cheap addition for better impact) but the exhibition sounds interesting - a trip to the Lakes for this and the paradise Lost exhibition sounds attractive:

Posted: 29-08-2004 18:45 Post subject: A new idea...

Just a thought but perhaps the only NATURAL progression for this topic and indeed this thread would be to merge this with the old one and then discuss "THEORIES" and how they might work rather than how they don't work because evidently that gives way to lots of poo-pooing for people and I think for the most part (something I'm equally guilty of since I don't hold much stock in it being a masonic plot and I tend to be equally dismissive about that avenue of thought since much of the evidence I've found is contrary to the evidence of those who believe it was...just an example but essentially that's generally it, right?)....I think for the most part there is a staggering amount of literature out there with regard to the topic...some people have read it all and some people have read some and some people have read non at all etc, but we all come into it with varying degree's of knowledge and perhaps varying degree's of opinion.

SO!!!!!!

The suggestion is to stick theories together and discuss the rudements of the theories themselves...how COULD they be possible and how COULD they fit. Let's face it, we're never going to solve the thing but I think it would be a lot more fun coming up with NEW and unexplored avenues of thought on the matter.

Who's with me?

In other words the possible theory that the killer was catholic as a starting point for one person and another person may add that the murders took place on days of saints and the persons killed were killed in such a manner as those saints and another person may contribute that Whitechapel was ancient sanctuary ground (chapel ground) and therefore the killer felt that only god could judge him (such is the law of sanctuary)...and another could contribute that perhaps the catholic was acting on behalf of the Vatican who just one year prior had innitiated a war on the masons with its "anti-masonic congress" which had been brought about because of infultration of masonic institutes by a journo who then informed the pope that their actions were satanic, and so a "disruptor" was sent...an agent of the vatican, a devout man...etc etc...

That sort of thinking...

Posted: 02-09-2004 23:10 Post subject:

I take it that's a no then.

Oh well.

Posted: 02-09-2004 23:18 Post subject:

New books out. Paul Begg Jack the Ripper : The Facts (looks good, although the title does give me the giggles! Smile

). And due out soon is The Jack the Ripper Suspects: 70 Persons Cited by Investigators and Theorists" Stan Russo;Hardcover; £31.95 (that's Amazon price - it's been reduced believe it or not). Rather pricey, but I could think of at least 70 good reasons to buy it Smile

Actually, I think the number of suspects is somewhere in the 300s. I remember reading that somewhere. Not bad for someone who only killed between 3-11 women, eh?