When pressed about the details of his involvement with the victim as distinguished from Odom’s, Lawson insisted, “I did not rape the girl. I only wanted to destroy her.”
This, I think, is what investigators were seeing at 13 Miller’s Court.
Inspector Frederick Abberline arrived and inspected the room. He concluded from the smoldering remains in the fireplace that the killer had burned clothing in there, as well as using the flames for illumination for his work.
For about a year before the murder, Mary Jane Kelly had been living on and off with a Billingsgate Market fish porter named Joseph Barnett. Life with him wasn’t uniformly harmonious. In July 1888, he’d lost his job because of theft, and at the end of October, he’d moved out of the room they shared because Mary had invited another prostitute to share the premises. He did, however, continue to visit her almost daily, sometimes giving her small amounts of money. There are also stories that he wanted to get her out of the street trade.
He last saw her between about 7:30 and 8:00 on the evening of Thursday, November 8, when he came by the room. Mary was in the company of her friend Lizzie Allbrook. Around eleven, someone thought they saw her in the Britannica pub with a young man. About forty-five minutes later, Mary Cox, another prostitute who lived in Miller’s Court, saw Mary with a different man, with a blotchy face, mustache, and hat. She was noticeably drunk. Between twelve and one, several other Miller’s Court residents heard her singing.
At two, she approached George Hutchinson, an unemployed laborer whom she knew, and asked for the loan of sixpence. Hutchinson was broke, so had to turn her down. Hutchinson saw her approached by another man as she walked away, and they were both laughing. He thought he heard the man say something like “You will be all right for what I have told you.”
Hutchinson couldn’t see the man’s face, but followed the pair back to Miller’s Court. He heard Mary say, “All right, my dear, come along, you will be comfortable.”
Approximately 3:45 A.M. on Friday morning, three women in Miller’s Court thought they heard a scream of “Oh, murder!” from the direction of number 13. If it was Mary Kelly who uttered that scream, they would have been the last words she ever spoke.
Joseph Barnett was subjected to four hours of intense questioning by the police. They took his clothing and examined it for bloodstains and other clues. They were satisfied he was not the killer. Recently, however, he has again emerged as a suspect, most prominently in the work of Bruce Paley, whose book Jack the Ripper: The Simple Truth was published in 1995. The theory is that he murdered the other women to scare Mary into giving up prostitution, and that he finally killed her in a mad frenzy when it became clear that she had tired of him and would not take him back. During his interrogation by police, Barnett admitted that he frequently read Mary newspaper accounts of the Whitechapel murders.
This theory offers an explanation of why the murders stopped, because they did, with Kelly’s death. Proponents of Barnett’s candidacy also point out that he was skilled with knives, had some rudimentary knowledge of anatomy, was a local who felt comfortable in the area and could therefore probably approach local hookers without alarming them, and generally fits the eyewitness descriptions. Barnett would, obviously, have easy access to Kelly’s room, and it could be more than coincidental that the “Dear Boss” letter mentions ginger beer bottles and such bottles were found in the room.
Paley also cites the analysis I did at the time of the 1988 television series, as well as more general research about serial predators that has come out of my unit at Quantico in showing how Barnett fits the profile. This could be true in certain ways—age, race, dysfunctional childhood with no father, comfort zone, triggering emotional event such as the loss of his job, for example—but these are the superficial characteristics, true of a lot of people. They’re almost boilerplate for a certain type of offender. You have to get into the specifics to see if it really fits. And I have never seen, nor do I believe someone would, in this manner, brutally kill women he knows, even vaguely, to scare his own partner and “teach her a lesson.” Particularly, on the night of the Double Event, a guy of this type would have been scared off by the first one. He would never have gone after Liz Stride.
The motive just doesn’t work. Yes, there are sexual sadists who get off by torturing women. But the mutilation here is all postmortem, so that doesn’t fit. Also, these are not planned, considered kills; they’re frenzied, out-of-control overkills. If the perpetrator were someone with a personal relationship with the victim, we might expect to see some degree of overkill in stabbing or wounds to the face, but not this kind of ritual mutilation. There’s no pattern or internal logic to it. No one who has had a relatively normal relationship with a woman, as Barnett evidently did, could perpetrate this kind of crime.
So if it wasn’t Joseph Barnett, who would have had no reason to go on killing after Mary Kelly’s death and would have been sufficiently scared by the police interrogation to keep his nose clean the rest of his life, why did the Ripper murders stop after Friday, November 9, 1888? That, of course, is one of the most tantalizing mysteries of the case.
Our research and experience in the Bureau shows that serial sexual predators stop for one of several key reasons, and burnout is generally not one of them. On rare occasions, an offender will have “accomplished” what he set out to do emotionally and will cease on his own. One such example would be Edmund Kemper, who abducted and murdered a series of coeds around the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the early 1970s. His rage against women was actually directed at his domineering, hectoring mother, and eventually he got up the guts to bludgeon her to death in her sleep with a claw hammer, decapitate her, rape her headless corpse, then tear out her larynx and jam it down the garbage disposal. He then called his mother’s best friend, and when she arrived at the house, he clubbed and strangled her to death. Having exorcised this demon from his system, he had a good night’s sleep in his mother’s bed, then drove to Pueblo, Colorado, where he called the Santa Cruz police from a phone booth and told them to come and get him. But as I say, such self-limiting killers are rare.
More often, serial predators stop for one of three reasons: they’re caught; they’re caught and put on ice for something else such as a breakin or robbery but not linked to their predatory crimes; or they die, while committing a crime, by the hand of an associate or other offender, by suicide, or by some other “natural cause.” Or they don’t really stop, they merely get scared out of a particular location and move on to another where their previous crimes are not linked.
Were any of these likely in the Ripper case? Let’s take a look at the profile to see if it gives us any suggestions.
THE PROFILE
VICTIMOLOGY
All of the victims were street prostitutes with moderate to severe drinking problems. Both of these facts create “high risk” victims, which makes it difficult to develop suspects. If any evidence such as hair and fibers or semen were obtained from the victim, even if such techniques had been available in 1888, investigators would not know for certain if it came from the subject or some other partner or customer. And since these prostitutes were independent, not controlled by pimps as so many are today, there would be little monitoring of their activities and transactions. That is to say that even more so than today, a female prostitute who drank heavily and then plied the already dangerous East End streets was looking for trouble.
Notwithstanding the Barnett theory and certain of the other conspiracy theories, all reasonable evidence suggests that the victims were targeted because they were readily accessible. The offender did not have to initiate the contact. With the exception of the last victim, Mary Kelly, the others were relatively old, beaten down by life and fairly unattractive. They would have initiated the contact. These are all important investigative considerations.
MEDICAL EXAMINATION
The critical findings for a behavioral analysis are:
No evidence of sexual ass
ault.
Subject killed victims swiftly.
Subject was able to maintain control of victims during the initial blitz-style attack.
Subject removed body organs from some of the victims, indicating some anatomical knowledge or curiosity.
No evidence of physical torture prior to death.
Severe postmortem mutilation.
Evidence of manual strangulation.
In most cases, blood was concentrated in small areas.
Rings were taken from one of the victims.
The last victim was killed indoors and was the most mutilated. Subject spent considerable time at the scene.
Time of death in all cases was in the early-morning hours.
CRIME AND CRIME-SCENE ANALYSIS
With the exception of Kelly’s murder, all of the crimes were committed outdoors, and all within an easy walk of each other. This makes the crimes high risk for the UNSUB since these are areas that are often populated around the clock, particularly in the warmer weather months before winter. The bodies of the four outside victims were all discovered within minutes with no attempt to hide them. This in itself is indicative of a disorganized killer. All of the homicides occurred either on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday early-morning hours.
After the first homicide on Buck’s Row near Whitechapel Station, the subject moved slightly across town to the west. If a line is drawn from crime scenes two, three, four, and five, a triangular configuration is formed. This has been observed in other types of serial crimes, and the triangle is viewed as a secondary comfort zone for the UNSUB. This movement is caused when a subject believes that the investigation is heating up in his primary comfort zone, which in this case would be the location of the first homicide, in the vicinity of Whitechapel Station. It’s my opinion that there were other attacks in the Whitechapel area that either went unreported or for some reason were not considered to be crimes of this offender. If, for instance, the Martha Tabram murder (which occurred not on a weekend but a bank-holiday Monday, another nonworkday) is considered a possible Ripper crime, we should note that it occurred just outside this secondary comfort zone, but to the west. I could make the case that the offender then went eastward for his next kill, before moving gradually back to the area in which he felt most comfortable.
Though the modus operandi evolves with the serial predator, the signature, or ritual aspect, remains in place, often becoming more elaborate over time, as was the case with the final victim. Here, the subject had the time and the privacy to fully act out his fantasies. If there were to be further murders, then, particularly if they were outdoors, we would not expect the subject to engage in such elaborate mutilation; he would not have the time.
COMMUNICATIONS ALLEGEDLY RECEIVED FROM THE SUBJECT
It is unusual for a serial killer of the disorganized asocial type to communicate with the police, media, family, etc. When they do, they generally provide specifics about the crime that are known only by the subject. In addition, they generally provide information about their motive for committing such heinous crimes. In my opinion, this series of homicides was not perpetrated by someone who set up a challenge against law enforcement. While the killer knew he would be receiving national and international publicity, this was not his primary motivation. If time and law enforcement resources were to be expended on the identity of the author or authors of the communications, emphasis should have been placed on the Lusk letter.
OFFENDER TRAITS AND CHARACTERISTICS
As noted earlier, these homicides may be classified as lust murders. This has less to do with the traditional meaning of the word than with the fact that the subject attacks the genital and sexually oriented areas of the body. Generally, when male victims are attacked in this fashion, they have been involved in homosexual relationships. Though it has been speculated that the offender could be a woman (“Jill the Ripper”), I have never experienced a female serial lust murderer either in research or cases we’ve received at Quantico. We can therefore state with confidence that Jack the Ripper was, in fact, a male. He was white, since these crimes tend to be intraracial, and since a black, Hispanic, or Asian would have stood out at the crime locations.
The age of onset for these types is generally between the mid to late twenties and early thirties. Based upon the high degree of psychopathology exhibited at the scene and his ability to avoid detection despite the high-risk nature of the crimes, the age of the subject is around twentyeight to thirty-six. However, it should be noted that age is a difficult characteristic to categorize, and consequently we would not eliminate a viable suspect exclusively because of age. For example, though we were correct on all other significant traits, we underestimated the age of a serial killer of prostitutes in Rochester, New York, in the late 1980s. The subject, Arthur Shawcross, had been in prison for fifteen years on charges of child assault and murder. When he got out, he merely picked up where he’d left off.
Jack would not look out of the ordinary. In my initial profile I suggested that the clothing he wore at the time of the assaults would not be his everyday dress, as he would want to project to unsuspecting females that he had money, so he wouldn’t have to initiate contact. But experts on the era have since informed me that unlike most of the modern prostitutes that I have encountered in crime investigation, the Victorian East End prostitutes were so desperate they would have approached anyone, regardless of dress. In fact, after the rumors surfaced that Jack might have been a medical doctor, they could have been even warier of a well-dressed and decidedly out-of-place customer.
I would expect this UNSUB to have come from a family with a domineering mother and weak, passive, and/or absent father. In all likelihood, his mother drank heavily and enjoyed the company of many men. As a result, he failed to receive consistent care and contact with stable adult role models and became detached socially with a diminished emotional response toward others. He became asocial, preferring to be alone. His anger became internalized, and in his younger years, he expressed his pent-up destructive emotions by setting fires and mistreating or torturing small animals. By perpetrating these acts, he discovered increased areas of dominance, power, and control and learned how to continue violent destructive acts without detection or punishment.
As he grew older, his fantasy developed a strong component that included domination and mutilation of women, along with a basic curiosity about them, unfulfilled in his real life. For employment, he would have sought a position where he could work alone and vicariously experience his destructive fantasies. If he were capable of such work, this might include employment as a butcher, mortician’s helper, hospital or morgue attendant. If employed, he’d have been off work on the weekends and holidays. He was paranoid and carried one or more knives with him in case of attack. This paranoid-type thinking would have been in part justified because of his poor self-image. He might have had some physical abnormality, scarring or speech problem that he perceived as psychologically crippling. He was not adept at meeting people socially, and most of his relationships would have been with prostitutes. Due to the lack of hygiene practices by street prostitutes at the time and the absence of treatment for venereal diseases, he may have been infected, which would have further fueled his hatred and disgust for women.
We would not expect this type of offender to have been married or to have carried on a normal relationship with a woman. If he had been married in the past, it would have been to someone older than himself, and the marriage would have been brief.
He would have been perceived as a quiet, shy loner, slightly withdrawn, obedient, and fairly neat and orderly in appearance. He may have drunk in the local pubs, at which point he may have become more relaxed and found it easier to engage in conversation. He lived or worked in the Whitechapel area, and the first homicide would have been close to either his home or workplace. Note that London Hospital is only one block from the Nichols murder.
The police might well have interviewed him more than once during the investigation. Unfortunat
ely, at this time there is no way to correlate this type of information. Investigators and citizens in the community had a preconceived idea of what Jack the Ripper would look like. Because of the belief that he would appear odd or ghoulish, they could have looked right past this individual.
PRE- AND POSTOFFENSE BEHAVIOR
Prior to each homicide, the subject was in a local pub drinking and lowering his inhibitions. He would have been observed walking all over the Whitechapel area during the early-evening hours. He did not seek a certain look in a woman; however, it was no accident that he killed prostitutes. He had the sense to know when and where to attack his victims. Many other women would have come in contact with this subject but were not assaulted because the location was not secure enough.
Postoffense behavior would have included returning to an area where he could wash his hands of blood and remove his clothing. Unlike more organized offenders, we would not expect him to have injected himself into the police investigation or to have provided bogus information.
Jack hunted nightly for his victims. When he could not find another, he would have returned to the locations of previous kills. If marked grave sites were accessible to him, he might have visited them in the early-morning hours to relive the experience of his crimes.
This subject would not have committed suicide after the last homicide. It would also be surprising for him to suddenly stop on his own without some outside cause.
INVESTIGATIVE AND/OR PROSECUTORIAL TECHNIQUES
If the suspect had been apprehended, I would have recommended interviewing him in the early-morning hours when he would have felt most relaxed and likely to talk or write about his motivation for killing women. He would not have been visibly shaken or upset if directly accused of the homicides because he believed they were justified in removing garbage from the streets. He would, however, have been psychologically and physiologically stressed if confronted with the fact that he became personally soiled by the victims’ blood. He would not have tried to outwit interrogators but might have become frustrated by their inability to understand why he took the actions he did.
The Cases That Haunt Us Page 7