by Trow, M. J.
In this chapter we have looked at other examples of dismemberment following murder. We have looked at dangerously deranged men who targeted prostitutes; at crimes committed near the banks of the Thames; at murders carried out and bodies dumped underwater. James Greenacre was caught by astute detective work and luck. Gary Ridgeway evaded police investigation for twenty years. The victims of the Cleveland Butcher and of Jack the Stripper still await justice. And little Adam may be the tip of a terrifying iceberg no one wants to uncover. Different times; similar crimes. No happy ending.
Chapter 13
The Habitual Homicide
One of the most disturbing facts about the arrest of Long Island murderer Joel Rifkin in June 1993 is that many policemen in the area had no idea that a serial killer of prostitutes was at large. The arrest had been for a traffic violation, but the arresting officers grew suspicious of a smell emanating from a tarpaulin in the back of Rifkin’s pickup truck and discovered a dead body, one of seventeen he had murdered over a period of time.
All this took place at a time when the concept of ‘serial killer’ was fully understood, when mind-mapping and geographical profiling were already cutting edge in the hunt for the seriously disturbed. A century earlier, the men hunting the torso killer had no chance. In looking for a madman, they were looking in the wrong direction altogether. We have already examined the various ‘men behaving madly’ who wandered the streets of late Victorian England and some of them conformed to the stereotypical dribbling lunatic who ranted and raved and frightened the children. London’s asylums, like those all over the world, were full of such people and if it was no longer fashionable to poke these sad cases with sticks to see how they would respond, the exact nature of their illness was usually woefully misunderstood. Restraints and cruelty were all too often the order of the day rather than kindness and understanding.
In the sixteenth century, the ‘scientific’ rage was physiognomy. External appearance – sizes and shapes of noses, ears, lips – spoke volumes about the appearance of a man’s soul. This is why Shakespeare and his audiences were quite happy to accept as truth the behaviour of the greatest stage villain of all time – Richard III. Since Richard, according to gossip, was born prematurely with hair, teeth, a humped back, withered arm and deformed leg, of course it was possible for him to kill eleven people, including his own nephews, to get to the throne. And in some people’s minds, the physical-moral link never went away. In one of the scores of ‘helpful’ letters sent to the City Police during the Ripper scare of 1888, A Mason of the Union Bank of Scotland in Chancery Lane wrote to warn of ‘a repulsive man at Smith’s bookstall at Cannon Street Station’ on the night that Mary Kelly was murdered.
The spin-off of physiognomy by the early nineteenth century when James Greenacre was frantically distributing dismembered parts of Hannah Brown over London, was phrenology, essentially, the pattern of skulls. The Austrian doctor Franz Gall believed that the brain was composed of thirty-three ‘organs’. Some of these controlled essential human characteristics; others controlled sentiments; the third group recognized higher complexities such as cause and effect. One of these organs – which could be felt through the cranium – was what another age might call the criminal gene. Identify this in infants and criminals could be stopped even before their careers began. Gall was not admired in Austria, but Britain, France and the United States were impressed. In America in particular phrenologists joined the scores of quacks who toured the fairs selling potions to cure anything from love-sickness to snake bites.
By the decade of the torso murders, Professor Rudolf Virchow of the Berlin Pathological Institute was making some interesting discoveries. His notes for guidance on autopsies became a bible across Europe. Drs Bond and Hebbert, who worked on both the torso and the Ripper victims, shared their faith in this man along with the more enlightened of the Met’s police surgeons. Virchow studied some 6,000 criminals over a twenty-year period, making careful measurements of their skulls in particular and came to the conclusion that criminal heads tended to the prehistoric, with relatively small crania and pronounced eyebrow ridges and muzzles.
Cesare Lombroso took up this torch with alacrity. He had served as an army surgeon with the Italians in the late 1860s and was appointed Professor of Mental Diseases at Pavia University. His ‘eureka moment’ came when carrying out a post-mortem on an executed thief: ‘At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see, all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal – an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.’
Three years after the torso killer first struck, Lombroso was made Professor of Forensic Medicine and wrote his seminal work L’Uomo Deliquente (Criminal Man) which made him a star almost everywhere except England. His division of criminals into ‘occasional’ and ‘born’ still strikes a chord today, but he could not escape from the myth of physiognomy. His sequel, written twenty years later (Criminal Anthropology, 1895) led to very specific identifications of criminal types. Pickpockets had long hands (no surprises there!) but they were also tall and had black hair and thin beards. Arsonists were light with small heads; rapists had short hands and narrow foreheads, they had abnormalities of the genitals (of course!) and of noses; assassins had wide cheekbones, thick hair and prominent jaws.
In France, Alexandre Lacassagne, Professor of Forensic Medicine at Lyon University, disagreed with Lombroso. With an argument that still finds favour today, Lacassagne regarded crime as a social manifestation. Poverty breeds despair and despair leads to crime, be it theft, rape or murder. The huge scale of physical differences between serial killers over the past forty years would certainly tend to prove Lombroso wrong, even if the jury is still out on Lacassagne’s argument. In France, too, the Bertillons, father and son, were taking physiognomy to a new – and vital – level. Louis Bertillon was President of the Paris Anthropological Society in the 1870s and by the time the torso killer had struck for a third and fourth time, leaving body parts in the squares of Bloomsbury, his son, Alphonse, was with the Parisian Prefecture de Police. Over a five-month period, the younger Bertillon assembled physical measurements – ‘portraits parlé’ (the speaking likenesses) – of 1,600 criminals on a cross-referenced card file system at the Sûreté. ‘Bertillonage’ proved highly successful, especially with the increasing use of photography, central to a crime scene today, and its use spread widely. Eliot Ness’s cops in Cleveland were still using the system to track down the butcher of Kingsbury Run in the 1930s.
The Italian criminologists Enrico Ferri and Napoleone Colajanni were interested in motivation for crime. ‘Cosmic’ causes included temperature and diet; ‘biological’ referred to anatomy, physiology, psychology; the ‘social factor’ reflected Lacassagne’s belief in ‘the price of alcohol’ and ‘the price of wheat’. Another Italian, Figerio, lectured on the largest ears he had ever seen which were on a woman charged with murdering her husband. Ottolenghi noted that sex offenders had rectilinear noses; Marro found most of them to be full-bearded.
The problem was that no one in the 1870s and 1880s had the nerve to dismiss the clap-trap of earlier generations. ‘I do not need to see the whole of a criminal’s face,’ wrote François Vidocq, the early nineteenth-century thief-taker, ‘to recognize him as such; it is enough for me to catch his eye.’ This classic piece of braggadocio is fine for a dodgy character writing his memoirs; but for an earnest policeman trying to catch the torso killer in the 1880s, it is of no use at all.
Lombroso had written:
The eye of the habitual homicide [serial killer] is glassy, cold and fixed; his nose is often aquiline, beaked, reminding one of a bird of prey … the jaws are strong; the ears long; the cheek-bones large; the hair dark, curling, abundant; the beard often thin, the canine teeth much developed …
One man who could have proved him wrong was Richard von Krafft-Ebing. An eminent Austro-German psychiatrist at a time wh
en that science was in its infancy, he ran a number of asylums in Germany before going into print with his Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886. The book broke new territory and polite society was appalled by it. It introduced all sorts of perversions to the great and good of Europe, including sadism, masochism (terms which Krafft-Ebing invented) and bestiality. A later edition of his work (probably published in 1892) refers to the Whitechapel murders. This is disappointing in that it contains various factual errors, presumably because the author was working from scrambled newspaper accounts and, among 238 cases he discusses, some distortion is inevitable.
Only one of Krafft-Ebing’s ‘lustmurder’ cases involves dismemberment. It is the rape-murder of little Fanny Adams, whose name became part of folklore, in 1867. Krafft-Ebing notes the chilling diary entry by killer Frederick Baker, a solicitor’s clerk from Alton, Hampshire: ‘Killed today a young girl. It was fine and hot.’ Having raped Fanny in a cornfield, Baker hacked her body into pieces and scattered them over a wide area. Some pieces, including the genitals, were never found.
The year after the last torso killing, Henry Havelock Ellis went into print with The Criminal. In terms of criminal psychology, he lamented the fact that Britain had fallen far behind Europe – ‘no book, scarcely a solitary magazine article dealing with this matter, has appeared among us’. In 1890, Ellis told his readers that about 100 people imprisoned yearly were found to be insane. He acknowledged just how in the dark doctors – and policemen – were:
The lunatic may be influenced by the same motives that influence the sane person, but he is at the same time impelled by other motives peculiar to himself and to which we may have no means of access.
It was not strictly true that all policemen were clueless. John Littlechild had been an inspector with Special Branch at the time of the Ripper killings and had been sent out to the United States in search of a possible suspect ‘Doctor’ Francis Tumblety. Answering a letter about this peculiar charlatan years later, Littlechild wrote:
He was an American quack … and was at one time a frequent visitor to London and on these occasions constantly brought under the notice of police [for acts of indecency with men] there being a large dossier concerning him at Scotland Yard. Although a ‘Sycopathia Sexualis’ subject he was not known as a ‘sadist’ (which the [Whitechapel] murderer unquestionably was) …1
The great psychoanalysts of the twentieth century were born too late to have any effect on the hunt for the torso killer. Sigmund Freud was 17 and still at school in Vienna when the first finds were made along the river at Battersea. Alfred Adler was only 3. Carl Jung would not be born until two years later. But one of the first men to work as a profiler, nearly a century before the term was coined, was Dr Thomas Bond, whose expertise we have seen in the physical sense of carrying out post-mortems on the torso victims. He was asked by Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, what sort of man the Whitechapel murderer was and this was his response:
The murderer must have been a man of physical strength and of great coolness and daring. There is no evidence that he had an accomplice. He must, in my opinion, be a man subject to periodical attacks of homicidal and erotic mania. The character of mutilations indicate that the man may be in a condition sexually that may be called satyriasis.2 The murderer in external appearance is quite likely to be a quiet, inoffensive-looking man, probably middle aged and neatly and respectably dressed … he would probably be solitary and eccentric in his habits. Also he is most likely to be a man without regular occupation, but with some small income or pension. He is possibly living among respectable persons who have some knowledge of his character and habits and who may have grounds for suspicion that he is not quite right in his mind at times.
Bond was describing, in modern psychiatric terminology, a disorganized ‘blitz’ killer, experiencing the grim cycle of homicidal mania outlined by Dr Joel Norris. Such men do not quite kill on impulse, in that they plan their crime and stalk their prey to an extent. But they are risk-takers, killing in public places, often (but not in Jack’s case) leaving behind the murder weapon which they found to hand. There is no attempt to conceal the crime and escape is largely a combination of low cunning and luck. The pity for us is that no one asked the prescient Dr Bond to give his thoughts on the torso killer.
If we fast forward to 1988, Special Agent John E Douglas of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia, was asked to provide a new profile of Jack for a television programme marking the centenary of the Whitechapel murders. It is fascinating to compare his work with Bond’s. The language may be more terse, in the bullet-point style to which we have become accustomed, but the similarities are extraordinary:
An asocial loner. Employment in positions where he could work alone and experience vicariously his destructive fantasies, perhaps as a butcher or hospital or mortuary attendant. Dress, neat and orderly. Sexual relationships mostly with prostitutes. May have contracted venereal disease. Aged in his late twenties. Employed since the murders were mostly at weekends. Free from family accountability and so unlikely to have been married. Not surgically skilled. Probably in some form of trouble with the police before the first murder. Lived or worked in Whitechapel area and his first homicide would have been close to his home or place of work. Undoubtedly the police would have interviewed him.
By the time he wrote his book The Cases that Haunt us in 2000, Douglas modified his views and went into greater detail. The most telling change of mind is that the profiler now believed Jack to have had ‘some anatomical knowledge or curiosity’.
It is difficult to know on what Thomas Bond based his ideas, but in the case of John Douglas, it was the culmination of years of experience in dealing with serial killers, 74 per cent of whom are American and many of whom have spent years in prison explaining their every move to psychiatrists. ‘We serial killers are your sons,’ wrote Ted Bundy chillingly, ‘we are your husbands, we are everywhere. And there will be more of your children dead tomorrow.’
There is no doubt that the serial killer – along with the paedophile – is the new bogeyman. Thanks to novels by Thomas Harris, Val McDermid, Kathy Reichs and many more, we, the public, treat them almost as old friends. In the film Silence of the Lambs, cannibalistic madman Hannibal Lecter, played with an eerie Gothicism by Anthony Hopkins, is employed by the FBI who are hunting an even more grotesque nutcase, ‘Buffalo Bill’ (Ted Levine). Harris borrowed bits from many of the real-life monsters of our time. Cannibalism was the stock-in-trade of the German killers Fritz Haarmann, Georg Grossmann and Karl Denke. Jeffrey Dahmer, the ‘Milwaukee Monster’, showed similar tendencies, as did Albert Fish when he roasted and stewed the body parts of 10-year-old Grace Budd. Russian killer Andrei Chikatilo ate the genitals of several of his child victims. As for ‘Buffalo Bill’, the man dresses up in the skin of his victims, a characteristic of serial killer Ed Gein. We are so inured to the bloody behaviour of serial killers that we think we know all about them. Yet with each one there seems to be a new angle, a different twist and we are really no further forward in understanding them or able to stop what sometimes seems like an epidemic! In the United States in 1988, the National Institute of Justice defined serial murder as ‘a series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually, but not always, by one offender acting alone. The crimes may occur over a period of time ranging from hours to years.’
An analysis of American serial killers provides a pattern which is often faithfully woven into fiction. Eighty-seven per cent are the ‘asocial loner’ which John Douglas associated with the Ripper. Ted Bundy followed this pattern. So did David Berkowitz, the ‘Son of Sam’. That of course still leaves 13 per cent who do not follow the convention. Ten per cent work in pairs, such as the Hillside Stranglers, Bianchi and Buono. The term applied to them, ‘social killers’, seems particularly rich in irony. Three per cent vary their approach, working either alone or with a partner. An unlikely gender combination is that of Douglas Clark and Carol Bundy, who targete
d prostitutes.
Killer types have been divided into: the territorial, who kill within a ‘circle of comfort’, a defined area they know well; nomadic, who travel widely in search of prey; and stationary, those who draw victims to a lair as a spider might catch a fly. Motivation varies. Some are vision killers, believing that God or the Devil has chosen them to carry out their work. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, claimed to hear voices from God: ‘The women I killed were filth – bastard prostitutes who were littering the streets. I was just cleaning up the place a bit.’ In his warped mind, he was just doing us all a favour. This makes him a mission killer too (the definition boundaries blur), where prostitutes, homosexuals, ethnic groups become the target. Pleasure killers are the thrill-seekers; Leopold and Loeb killed little Bobby Franks just to prove they could in 1924. They also kill for profit – John George Haigh who dissolved his victims in drums of acid before selling their furniture and houses is a classic example. The type most usually found in fiction is the killer who murders in order to exercise power or control. Harvey Glatman photographed his pretty female victims bound and gagged before he raped and killed them. Neville Heath thrashed Margery Gardner with a riding crop and almost bit her nipple off in the course of her murder.
David Wilson is one of Britain’s leading authorities on serial murder. His book A History of British Serial Killing (2009) cites the examples of thirty-one murderers and their 375 victims over a 120-year period. The figures fall far short of American statistics of course, and I have to take issue with Wilson’s contention that ‘The phenomena now known as serial killing – in Britain and elsewhere – formally begins on the night of 31 August 1888, when Mary Ann Nichols’ was murdered. Even allowing for the fact that I believe that she was Jack’s second victim (his first being Martha Tabram three weeks earlier), it is clear from the factual record that the torso killer beat Jack by fifteen years.