Jack The Ripper (Compendium Thread)

[FraterLibre]

Truth Will Out

That is dismissive of the importance of truth and the dignity of understand even the least important person's life and death.

 

[Anonymous]

Re: Truth Will Out ... Conundrum Challenge!

That is dismissive of the importance of truth and the dignity of understand even the least important person's life and death.

So it's not just the chance to intelectually immerse oneself in the 'Penny Dreadful' ambience of the seedy end of Victorian London and to speculate, endlessly, until 'the cows come home?'

Sometimes it all seems like, time and distance enhanced, rubbernecking.

To 'dignify' the whole process as a quest for justice, seems just plain bumptious.

'Jack the Ripper' has been part of the British tourist and entertainment industry, for too long, to leave much dignity over for the murderer's victims.

Solved, or unsolved, the crimes were never punished and time has put them beyond our physical reach. It is the mythos, the narrative, the interactivity and intertextuality (of the various, and increasingly spurious, sources) which continues to feed the whole demonic spectacular.

The truth is, without the notoriety, of the 'Ripper' murderer being the first popularily acknowledged, serial murderer of modern times and the ambience of the environment, in which the crimes took place, nothing would now remain, except a few sorry artifacts in the Metropolitan Police 'Black Museum,' some dusty archives and a few, yellowing, news clippings. Like so many other, tens of thousands of similiar, less notorious, ancient unsolved crimes.

 

[Spookdaddy]

To 'dignify' the whole process as a quest for justice, seems just plain bumptious.

'Jack the Ripper' has been part of the British tourist and entertainment industry, for too long, to leave much dignity over for the murderer's victims.

I have to say that I agree up to a point. Many individuals have made their money and reputations by endlessly digging over the bones of dead prostitutes and making up for the complete lack of new evidence by concocting more and more witless scenarios and serving them up as fact. And I can’t help feeling a certain sympathy with those feminists who see the entire industry as a kind of celebration of violence towards women.

However I don’t think you can entirely write off FraterLibres point. I mean, at what point does it stop being important who killed the Lindbergh baby or the Black Dahlia or those thousands of unsolved murders that don’t reach celebrity status.

I believe there is a basic human instinct which seeks equilibrium and the only way to reach that balance in the case of violent death is to identify the motive and the perpetrator. I’m not even sure that the desire for punishment is as strong as the desire for knowledge - in fact I’m pretty sure it isn’t. Certain crimes become fossilised in our consciousness because of their apparent insoluble nature - our anxieties may in fact increase with the passage of time rather than decrease because of the realisation that the further we get the less likely we are to find a solution. High status crimes allow us to focus all our anxieties in one particular area. The entire Ripper “industry” may simply be an exploitation of our inability to deal with lack of closure.

Does that sound like pretentious psycho-bullshit? Whatever - I do think it's relevant. It's not the only reason for our fascination but it's at least part of it.

Besides which there is no statute of limitations on human inquisitiveness. Which is just as well really or we would have a lot less to talk about and the publication we all love so dearly would be about half the size it is now.

 

[JamesWhitehead]

Browsing a wonderful online collection of 18th Century Newspaper
reports, I came across a ripper of 1728. The page details a number
of atrocities committed by gaolers.

There was nobody around then to say that this floridly violent act must
have been the culmination of a series of increasingly sadistic attacks. Even
if there had been, there was little forensic science to link crimes.

Rippers, I suspect, have always been with us. The mythos that they arrive
as a symptom of the industrial age and urban alienation rests on a
romantic view of a more innocent pastoral age.


http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/grub/cruelty.htm

5 October 1728 _____George Dewing late Keeper of the House of Correction at Halsted, who was condemn’d in March last at Chelmsford Assizes, for the Murder of a Bastard Child, begot on the Body of one of his Prisoners, pardon’d and oblig’d to plead his Pardon at the next Assizes, was last Saturday, committed to the County Goal of Essex, for another most barbarous murder of a traveling Woman, his Prisoner who sold Lace, and muslins, about the Country. After he had murder’d her, he cut her Bowels out, struck off her Head, and then with a Cleaver Quarter’d her. (The Flying-Post)

 

[FraterLibre]

Pegged

Spook pegged it. If everyone subscribed to Andro's cynical view we'd know next to nothing about the past. It's the quest to know. Punishment doesn't even enter into it.

 

[Anonymous]

Re: But What

But what would they have feared coming out at trial? What sort of revelations would have been so potentially embarrassing or incriminating? After all, these weren't brutal murders of VIPs, but of prositutes of the lowest sort for the most part, in a slum.

Much as I hate to sound trite, the answer is, I don't know. My thought processes were - they didn't find a patsy - why? Perhaps, as the argument used in JFK conspiracies, they didn't want anyone to stand trial for the specific crimes. Why wouldn't they want to end the matter?

I don't know what they were hiding, perhaps nothing, but in speculating whether they were hiding anything, I was led to wonder whether, if we assume they were hiding something, this was the reason for the lack of 'closure' on the Ripper.

 

[Anonymous]

Stephenson

From John Pope de Locksley

Stephenson may have drawn attention to himself by writing on 16 October to the city police and then writing the published articles in the pall mall gazette
confused with Dr John Sanders,locked up in an asylum and Dr John Sanders of St George's hospital, whose death was reported in the March 1889 East End Advertiser.The papaer tells us his death was hushed up for reasons unknown.
Druitt ie Berchart,the story of being told of a man being fished out of the Thames 1889,may refer to the suicide
of Col Clare whose body was found at Wopping near the murder sites.He suffered from black outs and when he returned from India the black outs continued.He vanished in 1889,he had shot himself with a carbine still in his hand,blew a nasty hole in his head and left the face black.This maybe blackfaced man fished out of the Thames mentioned by pc Woodhall in his 1930's book.

Does anybody know about a witness called Mrs Attterbury--this will put the cat among the pigeons,

John Pope de Locksley
as requested to be posted on his behalf

 

[FraterLibre]

Shine a Light

Well, I'm lost.

We've arrived in the center of the desert again, I see.

 

[FraterLibre]

Re: Help out of the bewilderness...

Never fear, the facts are always near. Thing is, you need to consider ALL the elements. Like you said earlier, you didn't buy Warren's concerns over the sheet being pulled down at Gaulston street....once someone puts a notion in ones head, then the truth has to be watertight and stand up to the strictest scrutiny....which is ludicrous, when we know that truth would often fall at the first hurdle of doubt but the theories would have fallen long before the truth had bolted from the gate.

Then who was there and why were his concerns not easily countered simply by assigning a pair of burly officers? You tell me to consider specifics I have no access to. If you have them, please share. I'm getting thirsty out here.

 

[FraterLibre]

Discussion Here

No no, for discussion here. What is it exactly that you mean when you assert that we should consider exactly who was there and how their presence may have affected Warren's decision.

I do have Sugden's book, haven't yet read it, and I'm not sure about the sourcebook.

In any case, I wanted you to be more specific here, for discussion's sake.

 

[FraterLibre]

But

I don't see how me not having read much of it prevents you from discussing the specific details that lead you to assert what you assert.

It's this maddening generality that fogs everything.

 

[FraterLibre]

Re: I sympathise with your frustration....but

The other way round.

It's speculations made when people haven't read much on it that creates a maddening fog, my friend.

There were ample reasons for him to whipe the graffitii off the wall....but if you don't know about the presure the city police had on the met, if you don't know exactly what was opening up for trade not three or four meters away from the graffiti, if you don't know what any of the police reports on the matter were, if you don't know Charles Warren's position and the public view of him following Bloody Sunday, if you don't know just how long it would have taken for the photographer to arrive and for him to have finished taking the picture... if you don't know any of these elements because you haven't read them, then how can we discuss further?

--You could tell us the details necessary to support furthering your thesis.

These are all elements very easily found on the net, I've no doubt. And besides which, its research. and the reason for research is to be able to come to your own conclusions, which I'm quite certain you'd much rather, otherwise you'd just have to take my word for it, and that would once again bring us back to this maddening fog of yours. Read it for yourself is the simple answer. It's all there.

--Been reading conflicting things for literally decades and as to research, only when I'm paid do I seriously, systematically do that. lol Perpahs this group needs to write a collective book, hm?

As for the one who dealt this ruddy fog of yours....blame Sickert...LOL.

--I rather like Sickert, actually. Seems to have been a jolly fellow.

 

[Anonymous]

the dewsbury ripper

Has anyone any info on the Dewsbury Ripper. I read about it several years ago in a magazine which unfortunately I lost and forgot about, but I do remember reading that there was a series of murders in Dewsbury around 1912 ish and it was all hushed up.
I wish I had kept the magazine!!

Barbara

 

[FraterLibre]

It Seems

It seems to be Sutcliffe related.

http://www.execulink.com/~kbrannen/otherv.htm

 

[FraterLibre]

Awhile back I theorized that, since the Ripper murders show the distinct signs of at least three pattern killers, perhaps more than one person was involved in the killings.

I now believe there was no Jack the Ripper. Just as there was no Boston Strangler. It was all media. Fake connections between separate murders. And bad interpretations of the bodies I might add, by unreliable methods and people didn't help, either.

Unless there can be substantially demonstrated a connection linking the canonical five murders -- and I don't think there can be -- then why must we link them at all?

And Jack's nonexistence pretty much explains everything we now consider mysterious, from the coppers standing down early to no one ever being named as a patsy.

I'm cognizant of the objection that it would be far too much a coincidence for there to have been more than one pattern killer in Whitechapel at the same time, but I'm questioning whether there was even one.

Anyone wish to counter this thesis?

 

[Anonymous]

More importantly, as I said before, if you take the media out of this, what have you got? If you take the cult of personality away from all that is Jack the ripper, what have you got? A string of motiveless killings....and its a very long string of motiveless killings too, not just the canonical five, but the torso's found in the Thames, Tabram, Emma Smith, and all the way back to the Radcliff highway murders and beyond. Just another murder on the streets.

I'd be inclined to take issue with this - blaming a cult of personality and the Dear Boss letter for the reasons we still talk about the Rippper is putting the cart before the horse.

The letter, and others like it, were a product of the hysteria that already existed, not its cause.

I don't see any reason to link the Pinchin Street torso with the Ripper either. It may have been the work of the same hand - but there's no real evidence to suggest as much. On the other hand, the murders of four of the five canonicals bear overwhelming similiarities that everyone from ordinary coppers to modern-day forensic psychiatrists can identify as the work of the same serial killer. We can also say that Tambram and Stride were very probably Ripper victims.

But I would prefer to strip away the convoluted theories of the past century and get back to basics. For example, no-one's going to identify Jack the Ripper through any Jubelum, Jubelo Masonic nonsense. Nor do I think it's right to dismiss the Ripper as a media concoction, conjured up out of a string of unrelated murders.

But if you add-up what is known, and keep looking for a later 20s, early 30s outsider with a history of violence and/or mental illness, he may yet turn up.

I think that draping the killings in elaborate theories is great fun, but to my mind, just an intellectual exercise, not a practical measure in terms of detective work. We're really only looking for "one sad bastard who cuts up women".

P.S. I'm doing one of the Ripper walks with my brother this evening, the one that starts at Tower Hill and where you only pay at the end. Be interesting to see how they play it.

 

[Anonymous]

Re: mythconceptions

But like I said, take the word Ripper out of what you're saying. That's an attributed term, you're trying to identify something that already has a predetermined identity because of the cult of personality that surrounds it...media hupe...strip that away and look soley at the murders....not so cart before horse really is it?....

There you go, that's exactly what I mean by thinking outside the box. take what we truly have....not what some convoluted facts laced over fiction dictate.

And to see how much they charge you

It's a fiver for the tour - not too bad I suppose, although I am really am borassic at the mo. But I digress.

I don't get what you mean, EZ, when you say the Ripper phenomenon has a "pre-determined identity because of the cult of personality".

Some journalist wag gave the Ripper his media name via the postcard - but he wrote the postcard presumably in order to perpetuate interest in the killings because they were shifting copy like nobody's business. It worked, and in due course inspired a wave of copy-cat letters.

So yes, media hype came hot on the heels of the murders. Strip away that hype, and what do you have? Answer - a series of murders unique and unprecedented in recorded urban history up to that point. Result - a wave of public interest, leading to media hype.

If you'd prefer we can talk about "the Whitechapel murders" rather than "Jack the Ripper". But it doesn't make them any less extraordinary or fascinating.
The Ripper murders were a big deal all round the world in 1888 - the interest was genuine, not manufactured.

 

[FraterLibre]

Key

The key question is whether there really is a set of linked murders. If there was a serial killer operating then we may still be able to identify him -- and he would be the sod we all know as Saucy Jack.

If, however, there were only unrelated murders linked only by media and public hysteria, then EZ's right and Jack's a fictional character from the start.

 

[Anonymous]

Re: Key

The key question is whether there really is a set of linked murders. If there was a serial killer operating then we may still be able to identify him -- and he would be the sod we all know as Saucy Jack.

If, however, there were only unrelated murders linked only by media and public hysteria, then EZ's right and Jack's a fictional character from the start.

this has come up elsewhere on the thread, but have you guys read the theory in "The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper" that the Ripper wasn't one man, but a couple of random murders, followed by a series of dockers wanting to be "Jack the Ripper for a night". It's along the lines you are thinking here. I personally didn't buy it.

 

[FraterLibre]

Casual Killing

Strikes me as unrealistic to propose a whole crew of thrill killers who took turns doing nasty knifework for sport. Might make a good movie, though.

 

[FraterLibre]

One Versus Many

One sociopath pursuing blood sport with human targets is one thing, but a group quite another. Even a folie-a-deux usually has but a single instigator and controller. A group simply wouldn't remain cohesive, or secret, for long.

And really, despite tough talk, most cannot kill dispassionately. And if they're passionate about it, it's no longer a sport, is it?

 

[Anonymous]

Re: Re: Casual Killing

and yet Sickerts rambling masonic finger pointing is deemed acceptable by some when this is the same chap who suggested that the ripper was J.K Stephen, Gull, Lord Salisbury, Netley and Sir Randolph Church hill all in one , engaging in serial killing as a sport.

Maybe they were simply thinking outside the box?

 

[FraterLibre]

Gangland Chicaco

You have to go to criminal gangs, such as those who operated in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. Prohibition made profits so high that the gangs literally didn't care about law of any sort, and the violence escalated remarkably. There were indeed sociopathic groups of killers operating in that climate. However, they were hired killers and did a job for pay, whether or not they enjoyed their work.

Truth is, I'm hard pressed to think of groups of killers, especially those doing it for sport. Roving bands of killers is more a paranoid fantasy than a reality, even when it comes to, say, motorcycle gangs and so on.

George Bernard Shaw and others suggested that Jack the Ripper was a social reformer, using a garish and extremem method of public relations to focus attention on the plight of Whitechapel's poor. Perhaps, but it's unlikely to have been this motivating someone who did to Mary Kelly what was done.

 

[FraterLibre]

To Quote Satchmo

If you have to ask, you'll never know.

Too personal.

 

[FraterLibre]

Louis Armstrong

I was quoting a jazz source.

What happened to Mary Kelly is too personal to have been a professional hit, is what I meant. Sorry I was terse, time constraints pounced.

 

[Anonymous]

Re: Re: Re: mythconceptions

Conner's, I hope you enjoy the tour. Certainly a nice night for it One thing I'd be interested in hearing once your back though, what "IMPRESSION" did you get of Jack from the tour guide?

I had my reservations before we embarked on the tour, but my mind was quickly put at rest by one key fact: our guide was none other than Donald Rumbelow; ex City copper, renound crime writer and author of "The Complete Jack the Ripper".

Rumbelow has fantastic presence and is a natural raconteur, his panache and the depth of his knowledge serving to draw in and enthrall the audience. There were maybe sixty of us (at a fiver a pop plus the dozen or so books he shifted at the end of the night, that's got to be £500 - nice!), mostly a mixture of American, Australian and European tourists, and he knew how to give them exactly what they wanted.

While never exaggerating or misleading, Rumbelow brought across the full horror of the killings, his talk underpinned by the wealth of contextual detail he provides about slum condtions in the East End of the later Victorian era (I recognised many anecdotes from his book, mind).

It was particularly effective that while we started off in the shadow of the modern buildings of the financial sector, we got deeper and deeper into what remains of the old East End, almost as if we were heading backwards in time.

For the sake of expedience, we went Tower Hill > "The Prostitutes's Church" > Mitre Square > Goulston Street, then onto Spitalfields market and finally ending at the site of Miller's Court, the position of Mary Kelly's room marked with a chalk "x" on the wall of the building that now exists there. We didn't do Buck's Row, Berner Street or Hanbury St, presumably because the first two are too far out of the way, and because it's impossible for large groups to move easily around Hanbury Street, which intersects the always-busy Brick Lane, where dozens of touts are plying for business at their curry houses.

At the end of play, someone brought up the Cornwell book, clearly under the impression that the matter had been settled and Sickert fingered as the Ripper. Rumbelow was measured in his criticism of Cornwell, but left the audience in no doubt of his views on Sickert's candidacy.

As the group dispersed and we headed to Liverpool Street tube, I collared Rumbelow and asked him a couple of questions. The first was why he'd stated that the Lusk kidney was Eddowes' as if it were a firmly ascertained fact, and the second was about his relationship with Stephen Knight. He conceded that the matter of the kidney hasn't been settled, but he does believe the Lusk letter is genuine. We talked a bit abut Knight, but I didn't want to ask too many awkward questions as I wasn't sure if maybe they'd been close friends. He did say however, that Knight went to his grave refusing to concede that he himself had uncovered research that torpoed his ripper-and-the-royals theory.

All-in-all a quality evening, and the missus now has a copy of The Complete Jack the Ripper, "signed by Donald Rumsfeld" as she put it.

Apparently Rumbelow does quite a few of these "London walks" (at £500 a time, I'm not surprised ). There are a number of competitors, but I'd be surprised if they're up to the mark. Anyhow, his walk kicks off at 19.30 each evening outside Tower Hill tube.

To answer your question EZ, the impression I got was very much of the man conjured up in Colin Wilson's 1974 introduction to the first edition of the Rumbelow book - the ousider and sexual sadist expressing his own inadequacies and frustrations in the most appalling way possible.

 

[FraterLibre]

Rumbelow Tour

Sounds wonderful; hope I get a chance to avail myself of his services one day. How old a man is he these days? Must be in his sixties, I'd think.

Wilson's view of the Ripper is the sensible one if there was a Ripper. How and why the canonical murders are linked to one killer is what I'd like to know I'm thinking there may be a detail common to all of them we're missing, or haven't been told, perhaps.

In truth, the huge festering flaw in the theory that Ripper was a fiction of Sickert and the media are the astronomical odds against a string of murders featuring post-mortem mutilations that seem to grow successively upon the last being the work of more than one kiler at the same time and place.

As to EZ's cavil that there were indeed other murders, were there? Were there really other murders featuring post-mortem disembowlment and trophy hunting? If so, why were they not included in the hysteria?

It seems to me obvious that at least the canonical five murders were obviously different from other knife-wound killings. Something set them out of context, made them stand out, and once that happened the link among them was obvious -- same killer. And once we're there, then Colin Wilson's analysis makes the most sense.

 

[phi23]

Re: Mary Kelly....a mason did it?

Colin wilson who praised Knights book was once invited to dine with a peer of the realm at the Athenaeum. He was told by this peer that if he persisted in making or supporting links between the royals and the "ripper" murders then certain doors would remain closed to him forever and that he would forfeit his knighthood.

Is it really that likely that Colin Wilson would ever be up for a knighthood?!?

 

[FraterLibre]

Depends When

This much depends upon when this threat was issued to Mr. Wilson, before or after the asinine scandal. When The Outsider was published Wilson was 24 and a cause celebre. He was feted and praised as Britain's answer, finally, to the prominent French existentialists, and rightly so.

Then a ridiculous media scandal ensued, during which the simple fact that he was living with a woman without benefit of marriage sufficed to cause scorn and outrage and the withdrawal of any favor his work enjoyed before.

So if the fellow was speaking to Wilson prior to the scandal, there may indeed have been mooted ideas of Wilson being knighted for his service to the realm. Not that it would have mattered much either way to Colin Wilson, who has brazed his own trail anyway.

He came back into any kind of prominence, incidentally, when he published The Occult and Mysteries, both of which achieving sales to rival those of The Outsider. So his links to things Fortean are strong and genuine.

 

[phi23]

Indeed - I don't doubt his fortean credentials and I know his life story quite well - (saw him speak about his life at this year's Occulture festival) I'm just suprised that he would be offered a knighthood is all - even for his one critically acclaimed book - The Outsider - not that it's really that important - and at the risk of going off topic - but do you have any more information about this meeting?