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** This is an archived, static copy of the Casebook messages boards dating from 1998 to 2003. These threads cannot be replied to here. If you want to participate in our current forums please go to https://forum.casebook.org **
Already Dead? Disabled? Asleep?
Casebook Message Boards: General Discussion: Miscellaneous:
Already Dead? Disabled? Asleep?
Author: Diana
Wednesday, 14 August 2002 - 09:19 pm |        | Could it be that Jack lurked about looking for a victim who was already down? Tabram was found on a landing. Could she have fallen down the stairs because of being drunk and have been knocked out or killed before JTR came along and cut her up?
Nichols collapses in a drunken stupor on Bucks Row and is lying there unconscious or dead when JTR finds her. Chapman can't get her doss money so she sneaks into the yard on Hanbury Street to sleep it off. She knows about it because she has serviced customers there before. Stride is knocked out by the attacker seen by the witness (Kidney?) Eddowes is a problem I admit but it is not at all unlikely that Kelly was attacked in her sleep. It would explain the lack of any crying out or scuffle and in some instances the paucity of blood. |
Author: Garry Wroe
Thursday, 15 August 2002 - 02:07 pm | | Hi Diana.
This is an interesting proposition, but one that isn't really supported by the evidence. Although it is by no means impossible, Tabram is unlikely to have been a Ripper victim. PC Neil's beat, moreover, took him down Buck's Row at thirty minute intervals, thus indicating that he would have spotted a sleeping Nichols earlier and either moved her on or arrested her for vagrancy. Given that the voices heard by Albert Cadosch were almost certainly those of Chapman and her killer, it may be safely assumed that Dark Annie was awake immediately prior to her murder. Liz Stride, quite simply, was not a Ripper victim. Eddowes was spotted with her killer less than a quarter of an hour before her body was discovered in Mitre Square. As for Kelly, she was almost certainly the person who emitted the cry for help heard by Sarah Lewis and Elizabeth Prater.
The apparent ease with which the victims were subdued may be accounted for by several factors. All of the victims, for example, had been drinking prior to their deaths and were almost certainly fatigued too. This would suggest that each was neither physically robust nor mentally alert. Each body also evinced one or more classic signs of strangulation. Such a mode of attack would have enabled the Ripper to debilitate his victims quickly and in virtual silence and also explains the lack of blood at the crime scenes.
Still, it was an interesting idea.
Best wishes,
Garry Wroe. |
Author: Scott Nelson
Thursday, 15 August 2002 - 02:22 pm | | | Lots of assumptions in your first paragraph there, Garry. |
Author: Garry Wroe
Thursday, 15 August 2002 - 02:32 pm | | Hi Scott.
I'm open to suggestions.
Regards,
Garry Wroe. |
Author: Diana
Thursday, 15 August 2002 - 08:58 pm | | I concede that Tabram is iffy. Nichols could have been asleep for less than half an hour. I picture a situation where the attack briefly rouses Chapman for long enough to utter a cry and try to sit up. As he pushes her back down her head bangs the fence. I'm surprised you didn't mention the shoe trimmer (his name escapes me for the moment) because he presents an even bigger problem. I concede Stride is iffy. Eddowes said she was afraid her significant other was going to beat her up when she got home. Suppose the woman seen outside Mitre Square was someone else? Eddowes goes to the square. She will sleep in a dark corner and face her boyfriend in the morning.
I see Kelly being briefly awakened by the attack and able to cry out once before being subdued and killed. |
Author: Dan Norder
Friday, 16 August 2002 - 08:22 am | | Diana: Interesting conjecture. It certainly could have applied to some of the victims, but it sounds like a stretch for it to apply to all of them.
Garry: Your conclusions are logical but don't become facts without a lot of evidence that we just don't have. For example, I'm not sure we can put much weight into most of the statements by witnesses. Surely if we discount the witnesses who claim to have seen MJK alive after the assumed time of death it's likely that some other witnesses were inaccurate as well. And even if Eddowes was correctly identified that doesn't necessarily mean the man with her at the time was the killer. It's a logical assumption, but not guaranteed.
But, asleep or no, the victims were not in conditions to be able to defend themselves well. Being quite drunk or ill is close enough to unconscious and defenseless. I think Jack could spot the targets that were most likely to expire without causing a lot of noise or resistence.
Dan |
Author: Garry Wroe
Friday, 16 August 2002 - 04:19 pm | | Hi Diana and Dan.
Whilst taking on board your observations regarding the sleeping victim scenario and agreeing that one must exercise extreme caution when dealing with eyewitness reports, I nevertheless feel that, without additional supporting data, the proposition itself is evidentially improbable. Vagrancy was taken very seriously in 1888. Hence sleeping drunks were removed from the streets as a matter of routine and could be fined or imprisoned for such an offence. The policeman's beat usually took him by a given point every fifteen or twenty minutes, which explains why homeless paupers gravitiated to 'Itchy Park' and similar out of the way locations. Let us not forget, too, that prostitutes serviced customers in the yard of 29 Hanbury Street not because the locus was a romantic haven, but because conducting business away from the street and the prying eye of the beat policeman significantly reduced the risk of arrest. Given these and other factors, therefore, I think it unlikely that Nichols, Chapman and Eddowes would have risked arrest (and mugging or worse) by sleeping on the street in the first place. But even if we accept that this was not the case, it is certainly stretching credibility to suggest that these women managed to escape the attention of the local beat policeman but not a prowling serial killer. To compound this improbability, Jack the Ripper just happened to wander into a yard and chanced upon a sleeping Annie Chapman ...
Again, this is an interesting proposition, but one that isn't borne out by the known evidence or established historical factors.
Best wishes,
Garry Wroe. |
Author: Diana
Saturday, 17 August 2002 - 03:47 pm | | The nice thing about civilized debate is that as other posters point out the weaknesses in our arguments we can refine them and maybe get closer to the truth. I would like to compliment Mr. Wroe. He and I have been disagreeing agreeably for several days now but without rancor. I appreciate his input on this subject as it stimulates my thinking. He has always disagreed with me in a polite respectful manner which I think can be a model for all posters on these boards and I hope he has found my responses to be equally civilized.
I can see your points and it will certainly force me to at least refine my theory. The most likely victim to fit my scenario is Kelly. She was found in a chemise which certainly suggests she was attacked in her sleep. However, it is possible that JTR was a customer and he attacked her as soon as she had changed into the chemise (still standing) or as she was servicing him (down).
If JTR lived in Whitechapel he was probably quite used to seeing inebriated people on the street. He probably got proficient at identifying individuals who had gotten to the staggering stage of near unconsciousness. As he prowled the streets he would fasten on such women and follow them waiting for the moment of inevitable collapse. This would explain why there wasn't time for the beat cop to come along and rouse them if he was following them. It would explain how he knew that Chapman had gone into the Hanbury street house. He may have followed Kelly to her door and then stood outside the broken window listening until he heard the deep breathing rhythym of sleep or even snoring. He may have even bought them drinks in the Ten Bells or the Britania in order to hasten the process. |
Author: Timsta
Saturday, 17 August 2002 - 04:39 pm | | Whilst not subscribing to the theory that the victims were asleep or nearly so, I think it quite possible that JTR may have selected women who were inebriated or showing signs of physical infirmity, if only because they would be easier to overpower, or perhaps because they would have fewer suspicions or inhibitions, for example.
Nichols was described by Ellen Holland as 'drunk and staggering' about an hour before her body was found. Chapman was 'drunk' according to Donovan at 1.35am and was in very poor physical health. Stride had been drinking at the Bricklayer's Arms (and earlier, in the Queen's Head). Eddowes had been locked up for public drunkenness that night. Kelly 'may have been drinking with Elizabeth Foster, and she may have been seen, intoxicated, in the Britannia at 11.00pm' (A-Z).
Were all Whitechapel prostitutes drunk, all the time?
Then again, I think it's near impossible to identify the selection procedures he may have used; if you believe as I do that he was suffering from some kind of schizophrenic disorder, small details may have held tremendous significance for him (clothing, words spoken by the women to solicit business, etc).
Regards
Timsta |
Author: Jean-Patrick Moisy
Saturday, 17 August 2002 - 07:04 pm | | Timsta,
Prostitutes in Whitechapel were probably drunk a good part of the time. This goes with the job, which is usually the last one available for a desperate woman. I may be wrong, but I was reading Garry's book recently and I think he was writing somewhere that MJK was both hating her job as a prostitute and drinking to cope with it (not sure I am quoting right, but...)
This goes also with the frequentation of pubs, being both a social place where they could meet their clients and a place where they could warm up after streetwalking a few hours in the cold, bleak nights of the London autumns.
So yeah, they were drunk, in the middle of the night and so quite easy to be persuaded to come in a dark courtyard with a customer...
I am not totally sure about JtR suffering from a schzophrenic desorder (but you may be right, after all: the only thing I am sure of is that I am sure of nothing!) but if it was the case, he would surely find importance in little details (positionning of rings, etc.). Here again, we cannot know anything for sure.
Got documented cases about schizo killers? I could use a bit of reading on this particular subject.
Best regards,
JP |
Author: Timsta
Saturday, 17 August 2002 - 08:20 pm | | JP:
Yeah, I figured they would be drinking a lot. Perhaps the victims were particularly visibly drunk, or something. I think JTR was certainly an opportunist to some extent in his selection of victims, so a little drunken staggering probably 'helped'.
I sorta deliberately didn't mention rings, farthings, tin match boxes empty, whatever! I think there are enough uncontroversial aspects to the crimes and crime scenes to convince us that there are ritual elements to the killings. Ritual, of course is often associated with various forms of mental illness.
I think one thing to remember is that in the modern day we don't see often see untreated psychosis (although a tour of transients' doorways in, say, Kentish Town will give you a flavor). Therefore, we often associate the term schizophrenia with acute florid symptomology, which in a non-medicated regime is not the usual manifest behavior. I'm not trying to do a DSM-IV on the WM but I strongly suspect he was in possession of delusional beliefs.
As for schizo killers, I'm not really a big expert on SKs (I find them kinda distasteful in the main), but to my knowledge Sutcliffe claimed to have had a hallucinatory 'religious experience' while working as a gravedigger; and Ian Brady trottled out some twaddle about seeing the 'Face of Death' in a Glagsow shop window.
I'm led to believe that these statements are often unreliable since killers may often seek some kind of 'insanity defence'.
There's plenty of delusional belief systems on the web though: try www.timecube.com, www.otherkin.net, http://home.pacifier.com/~dkossy/dec.html,
www.succubushunter.com. Or anything on the Diary board. JOKING!
Regards
Timsta |
Author: Garry Wroe
Saturday, 17 August 2002 - 09:15 pm | | Hello Diana.
Thank you for your kind comments. But, given that courtesy costs nothing, I would like to think that we can disagree without falling out. That, after all, is the essence of civilized debate. All I can offer is an honest opinion. But if I am wrong regarding your sleeping witness proposal, you may rest assured that it wouldn't be for the first time.
The one observation I would like to offer concerns the Ripper's victim selection. To my way of thinking, he didn't go out deliberately looking for drunken prostitutes as is often supposed. Rather, he simply conducted his trawling activities at those times when the streets would be largely deserted of potentially dangerous eyewitnesses - the fewer the people that saw him, the fewer that would remember him. Consequently, he went in search of victims in the small hours. If I'm correct in this assumption, the women that would still be on the streets at such unsociable hours were almost all prostitutes looking for one last punter who might make the difference between sleeping in a bed or on the cold ground of Itchy Park. In other words, he selected victims of opportunity rather than specifically targeting prostitutes.
Regards,
Garry Wroe. |
Author: Jean-Patrick Moisy
Sunday, 18 August 2002 - 02:31 am | | Garry,
("I'm not worthy! I'm not worthy!")
Okay for that one, but I was merely thinking that any prostitute was most likely to be drunk at that hour of the night. For all the reasons I expressed earlier. So I go along with you, well, you did express my thinking better than I would have been doing it!
(and I am posting after 2am, so it is likely that I have been having one too much!)
JP |
Author: Garry Wroe
Sunday, 18 August 2002 - 11:11 am | | Hi JP.
Sorry if I conveyed the impression that I was criticizing your observations. On the contrary. I was simply trying to make a general point about the Ripper's victim selection, particularly since there is a view that he may have specifically targeted prostitutes as a means of seeking retribution for his having contracted some form of venereal disease. Similarly, there is a view that prevails to this day that has Sutcliffe as a prostitute killer. Examine his victims, however, and you will find that his earliest attacks (as well as some of the later ones) were perpetrated on women who could in no way have been mistaken for streetwalkers. One of his very earliest victims was a fourteen year old girl making her way home from school. As such, I'm not at all convinced that the Whitechapel Murderer explicitly sought out prostitutes. Rather, drunken prostitutes were just about the only people still on the streets at the times when he felt it safest to perpetrate his attacks.
As for the schizophrenic issue, I think it unlikely that, given his victim and environmental control, the Ripper could have been in the throes of florid schizoid episodes at the time of his attacks. But others, I'm sure, will disagree. It has been estimated by the FBI that about a third of serialists belong to the disorganized category (usually meaning paranoid schizophrenic). Richard Trenton Chase falls into this group, as does Ed Gein, Herb Mullin and Joachim Kroll, among others. But if you really want an insight into the mind of a schizoid killer, my suggestion would be that you get hold of Jon Pearson's The Profession of Violence, a book that charts the criminal career of the Kray twins. Apart from anything else, this is the best true crime book I've ever read - by a distance.
Best wishes,
Garry Wroe. |
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