Jack the Ripper and the Case for Scotland Yard's Prime Suspect

by Robert House

  Again, it seems that the real issue is not the problems in the statements of the police officials or even the gaps in our knowledge about him. Instead, it boils down to whether Kozminski fits the profile of a serial killer, and specifically, whether he fits the profile of Jack the Ripper. For example, even though Fido was happy to accept the truth of Anderson’s statements when applied to his own preferred suspect, Nathan Kaminsky, when the same statements were applied to Aaron Kozminski, Fido claimed that Anderson’s theory was “barmy.” Fido recently added that “if it is ever shown that Anderson really did mean Kosminsky [sic], then I dismiss Anderson and his theory as dead wrong. Kosminsky’s record shows that he wasn’t the sort of self-controlled figure who could rein himself in like the Green River murderer for a period of years.”11 It is not clear exactly what in Kozminski’s asylum record supports this view. But the statement reveals Fido’s main objection—specifically, that he thinks Kozminski simply doesn’t fit the profile of a serial killer.

  This begs the obvious question—does Kozminski fit the profile of a serial killer? In the next chapter, I will attempt to answer this question by comparing the known facts about Kozminski to the generic profile of a serial killer as defined by the FBI and other sources. We may find that a more thorough examination of the fragmentary evidence will vindicate Anderson after all and lead us, as it led him, to a moral certainty of Kozminski’s guilt.

  23

  A Modern Take on Serial Killers

  I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing. I was born with the evil one standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since.

  —Herman Webster Mudgett (aka H. H. Holmes), serial killer

  Sometimes I feel like a vampire.

  —Ted Bundy

  It seems likely that serial killers have been in existence for centuries, if not for the entire course of human history. Indeed, as author Peter Vronsky argued in his book Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters, it is even possible that serial killers served as the foundation for some of the more notable monster myths. Vronsky proposed that people would not have been able to conceive that ordinary humans were capable of committing the types of heinous murders routinely committed by serial killers and would have instead imagined that such crimes were committed by vampires or werewolves roaming in the streets or in the woods. One interesting example along these lines was the 1603 case of Jean Grenier, a fourteen-year-old boy in France who admitted to eating several children after he was transformed into a werewolf. Physicians at Grenier’s trial determined that the boy did not in fact turn into a werewolf but that he was instead insane.

  Cases of serial murder in the distant past have not generally survived in documentation, except when the killer was a notable figure in government or the nobility. One such example was Gilles de Montmorency-Laval (aka Gilles de Rais), a wealthy aristocrat who killed hundreds of children in fifteenth-century France. At his trial, de Rais described how he tortured and sodomized both boys and girls and claimed that he “caused their bodies to be cruelly opened and took delight in viewing their interior organs.” As he admitted, “I committed [the crimes] solely for my evil pleasure and evil delight.” De Rais and two accomplices were excommunicated and then hanged for their crimes.1 Another extraordinary example was Erzsébet Báthory, a Hungarian countess who may well have been the most prolific serial killer in history. Báthory was said to have tortured and killed upward of six hundred young women in the gynaeceum of Cachtice Castle and at several other properties she owned in Hungary. The torture she inflicted included extended beatings, burning, mutilation of hands and genitalia, starvation, and eating flesh off her victims. (The story that the countess bathed in the blood of her victims in order to maintain a youthful beauty was apparently a myth, invented more than one hundred years after her death.)

  Various accounts of serial murder began to crop up in the nineteenth century. In 1808, the “Bavarian Ripper” Andreas Bichel was arrested for murdering several young women who came to his house seeking employment as servants. Referring to the murder of one victim, Bichel said, “I opened her breast and with a knife cut through the fleshy parts of the body. Then I arranged the body as a butcher does beef, and hacked it with the axe into pieces. I may say that while opening the body, I was so greedy that I trembled and could have cut out a piece and eaten it.”2 Another example was Vincenzo Verzeni, the so-called Strangler of Women, who killed and mutilated two women (and attacked several more) in Italy in the 1870s. Vincenzo was said to have been completely ignorant of sexual intercourse and admitted, “It never occurred to me to touch or look at the genitals and such things. . . . To this very day I am ignorant of how a woman is formed.” Instead, he derived pleasure from killing and sucking blood from his victims. “I have really butchered some of the women,” he admitted, “and I have tried to strangle a few more, because I take immense pleasure in these acts. The scratches found in the thighs weren’t the product of my nails, but of my teeth, because after the strangulation I bit her and sucked the blood that dripped out, which I enjoyed very much.”3

  Despite such notable cases, by the late nineteenth century, the concept of serial murder was still practically unheard of, and the phenomenon of so-called motiveless murder was discussed only in obscure academic publications, such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). Krafft-Ebing pointed out a connection between lust and the desire to kill—citing, for example, the case of a prostitute killer named Phillipe, who stated, “I am fond of women but it is sport for me to strangle them after having enjoyed them.” Krafft-Ebing theorized that a great number of lust murderers were driven by a combination of “hyperaesthesia and paraesthesia sexualis,” in other words, a sort of hypersensitivity of the skin of the sexual organs, characterized by a tingling sensation, possibly caused by nerve damage.4 Such an idea may seem strange today, but it was consistent with the nineteenth-century tendency to connect criminal behavior with various biological and physiological abnormalities. It was the age of phrenology and physiognomy, and many people believed that criminality was an inherited trait, which could be identified by physical defects known as stigmata—sloping foreheads, asymmetric facial features, and so on. In 1876, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso published L’uomo Delinquente (The Criminal Man), essentially arguing that criminals were atavistic throwbacks to an earlier, more primitive state of human evolution—animals, basically.5

  Modern Advances in Criminology

  Today, the understanding of criminal behavior and serial murder is obviously somewhat more advanced than this. Researchers from a variety of disciplines, including sociology, psychology, and biology, have studied serial killers from numerous angles, in an attempt to understand what makes them tick. Over the years, several predictive models and classification systems have been proposed, but most have proved to be insufficient in some way or another. In short, it is difficult to put serial killers into any one box, and many of the assumptions about serial killers have turned out to be wrong.

  Despite this, it has been shown that there are some traits and behaviors that seem to be common to a large percentage of serial killers. Two of the first people to apply statistical analysis to the study of serial killers were John Douglas and Robert Ressler of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU), aka the “Hannibal Lecter Squad.” Between 1979 and 1983, Douglas and Ressler interviewed thirty-six convicted sexual killers (most of them serial killers), asking them about their backgrounds, crimes, and victims. The purpose of their research was to come up with a theoretical model to explain the behavior of sexually motivated killers through an analysis of various psychological and sociological factors. The data that Douglas and Ressler collected laid the foundation for a statistical analysis of the characteristics of serial killers in a general sense, and their results were published in 1995 under the title Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motiv
es.

  The application of such analysis in actual criminal investigations is called criminal profiling or offender profiling. According to Ressler et al., “Criminal profiling and criminal personality assessment are ways in which law enforcement has sought to combine the results of studies in other disciplines with more traditional investigative techniques in an effort to combat violent criminal behavior.”6 In practice, this means that crime scenes are analyzed in the hopes of finding minute clues that will indicate likely characteristics of the offender and thus narrow the field of investigation.

  Criminal profiling has come under attack lately, due in part to the romanticized portrayal of profilers on TV and in movies like Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs. Critics argue that criminal profiling is more in the realm of fiction than scientific fact. In an article in the New Yorker magazine, journalist Malcolm Gladwell wrote that offender profiling was nothing more than a “parlour trick.” There is probably some truth in this, and profiling has indeed been shown to be frequently inaccurate in predicting an offender’s behavior and character traits, such as age, race, profession, and so on. Yet the basic concept of profiling is both valid and natural, and according to the FBI, profiling should be thought of as just another tool that is used to focus a criminal investigation. When specific aspects of a profile are used to eliminate suspects, however, an investigation might start to go off the tracks. In any case, it is not my intention to assess the viability of criminal profiling, but instead to look at the general characteristics of serial killers and see whether Aaron Kozminski has those traits.

  One of the most fundamental findings of the BSU study was that the majority of sexual killers were preoccupied with active and deep-rooted fantasies “devoted to violent sexualized thoughts.” As a result, Ressler and Douglas came up with the hypothesis that “fantasy drives behavior.” The fantasies were typically established early on and came to play a central role in the killer’s thought patterns. “One assumption regarding early traumatic events,” the report stated, “is that the child’s memories of frightening and upsetting life experiences shape his developing thought patterns. The type of thinking that emerges develops structured, patterned behaviors that in turn help generate fantasies and daydreams.”7 Such fantasies were usually violent and sexual in nature and often involved a role reversal, from being the victim to being the victimizer. The authors speculated that fantasies “used to cope with childhood abuse and unsatisfactory family life might turn a child away from reality and into a private world of violence where the child can exert control.” Predictably, the fantasies would often revolve around themes of domination and control of others.

  At some point, the fantasy would reach a point where its “inner stress” became overpowering, and a negative event in the person’s life would act as a “trigger,” causing him to move beyond fantasy to actually acting out his urges in real life. Often the trigger would be a negative personal event, such as the loss of a job, the death of a significant person, or the breakup of a relationship. Ressler and Douglas believed that aspects of a killer’s fantasy represented an unconscious desire he was trying to fulfill, and that the killing itself was often secondary to this primary “need.” This theory formed the basis of a differentiation between a killer’s modus operandi and his “signature.”

  Modus Operandi and Signature

  Modus operandi (MO) is the method used by a criminal to achieve his (or her) goals, without being captured. As pointed out by author Brent Turvey, this “is not the same thing as an offender’s motive.”8 Signature, on the other hand, is more closely related to the underlying motivation behind the murders (that is, the fantasy) and is defined as what the killer is driven to do. Examples might include posing the body, taking souvenirs, or arranging objects at the crime scene. According to Turvey, “an offender signature is a pattern of distinctive behaviors that are characteristic of, and satisfy, emotional and psychological needs.”9 The concept is illustrated by the following, rather chilling, statement of serial killer Edmund Kemper. “I am sorry to sound so cold about this,” he said, “but what I needed to have was a particular experience with a person, and to possess them in the way I wanted to: I had to evict them from their human bodies.”10 In other words, for Kemper, murder was merely an MO to achieve his goal of possessing a human body.

  Some experts claim that a serial killer’s MO can evolve over time as the killer learns from his mistakes and develops more efficient methods of killing. Predictably, this evolution is most evident in the earliest murders in a series. As noted in the Douglas and Ressler study, the killer’s fantasies “prior to the first murder, focused on killing,” as opposed to “fantasies that evolved after the first murder, which often focused on perfecting various phases of the murder.”11 In contrast, it is believed that the essence of a killer’s signature will not fundamentally change. Jack the Ripper’s signature, for example, was the mutilation of his victims’ abdomens and reproductive organs. The Ripper’s MO, on the other hand, involved killing his victims quickly and silently in dark and secluded locations, so that he could achieve this goal, ideally without being interrupted for some amount of time.

  In his essay “The Importance of Fairy Fay, and Her Link to Emma Smith,” Quentin L. Pittman suggested that the murders of Annie Millwood and Emma Smith and the attempted murder of Ada Wilson were examples of the Ripper “learning his craft.” In the case of Wilson, it is possible that the Ripper made an attempt at slashing the throat, which failed when Wilson fought back and began to scream. Autopsies on the later victims suggest that the Ripper may have strangled his victims into unconsciousness before cutting their throats. This may have been a learned behavior. As Pittman suggested, “Perhaps the killer began not in August, but in February, with the awkward, unseen attack on Annie Millwood in White’s Row. Then in March, he ventured to Mile End, where coincidentally Annie Millwood was recuperating at the South Grove Workhouse, and attacked Ada Wilson. After a narrow escape, he then returned west, to his epicentre, where in April he crudely attacked Smith.”12

  Indeed, many serial killers have acknowledged the confused nature of their first attempts at murder. The following quote from one of the subjects in the BSU study illustrates this: “It was almost like a black comedy of errors, the first killings, two people, it was terrible because I made three fatal errors in the first twenty-four hours. I should have been busted. I saw how loose I was and I tightened it up, and when it happened again and again I got tighter and tighter and there weren’t any more slips.”13

  Likewise, Ted Bundy described his earliest failed attempt at abduction and murder as “sort of half-hearted, sort of confused. Several years later this process continued. The acting out, getting closer and closer . . . it wasn’t a complete, total, focused kind of aggression when I knew what I was doing . . . in Ocean City I realized just how inept I was.” He added, “I didn’t do that again for a long time. It scared me.” In a second failed attempt, Bundy said, “I ran in there and hopped on top of the bed and tried to put a pillow on top of the girl’s face. She struggled and started to scream and I ran away. End of story.”14 Bundy was horrified after his early botched attempts at murder, which he described as taking a step you “couldn’t ever return from.” After each attack, he would desperately try to overcome his violent urges, but as time passed, the shame at what he’d done would diminish and the old urges would come back again.

  In their first murders, some serial killers go out with only a vague idea that they might actually commit a murder. Bundy referred to this as taking his fantasy “out for a walk” or a “test drive.” The first murder is nearly always the most difficult for serial killers, both emotionally and psychologically and also in terms of technique. The killer might not bring a weapon with him, or if he does, it might be an inappropriate one, such as a clasp knife, for example. Later, the technique would improve, and the murders would be planned in advance. In one of Peter Sutcliffe’s first attempts at murder, he put some rocks and dirt into a sock and
swung it at the back of a woman’s head. He later used a hammer for a similar purpose, still striking his victims in the back of the head. Such behavior illustrates an evolution of the same basic impulse. A similar lack of planning is evident in the following quote by Bundy (it was supposedly so emotionally difficult for Bundy to describe his own murders that he referred to himself in the third person when doing so):

  On one particular evening, when he had been drinking a great deal . . . and he was passing a bar, he saw a woman leaving the bar and walk up a fairly dark side street. And we’d say that for no . . . the urge to do something to that person seized him—in a way he’d never been affected before. . . . And it seized him strongly. And to the point where, uh, without giving a great deal of thought, he searched around for some instrumentality to uh, uh, attack this woman with. He found a piece of a two-by-four in a lot somewhere and proceeded to follow and track this girl. . . . And he reached the point where he was, uh, almost driven to do something—there was really no control at this point.15

  The murders of Millwood and Smith and the attempted murder of Wilson may fall into a similar category of early, bungled Ripper attacks. The murder of Martha Tabram, which has already been discussed in detail, would represent a further evolution in technique, along the same lines.

  Family History