by Paul Roland
Inside the disturbing mind of Jack the Ripper
It is a disturbing fact that Jack the Ripper was not unique. Two years before the Whitechapel murderer terrorized the East End, the German-born psychoanalyst Richard von Krafft-Ebing published a weighty academic study of sexual perversion detailing many true cases of sadistic sexual murder which bear an uncanny similarity to those perpetrated by the Ripper. Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis was intended to prove that there was a scientific basis for all forms of sexual aberration so that the legal and medical authorities could understand the basis of these neuroses and psychoses and learn how to treat those who suffered from them. This influential study was revised and republished many times after its initial publication in 1886, with the Whitechapel case (number 17) added to a later edition. It remains a valued reference work for criminologists and profilers to this day.
‘(a) Lust-Murder (Lust Potentiated as Cruelty, Murderous Lust Extending to Anthropophagy).
The most horrible example, and one which most pointedly shows the connection between lust and a desire to kill, is the case of Andreas Bichel, which Feuerbach published in his “Aktenmassige Darstellung merkwurdiger Verbrechen”.
He killed and dissected the ravished girls. With reference to one of his victims, at his examination he expressed himself as follows: “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 an axe into pieces of a size to fit the hole which I had dug up in the mountain for burying it. 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.”
Lombroso, too (“Geschlechtstrieb und Verbrechen in ihren gegenseitigen Beziehungen.” Goltdammer’s Archiv. Bd. xxx), mentions cases falling in the same category. A certain Philippe indulged in strangling prostitutes, after the sex act, and said: “I am fond of women, but it is sport for me to strangle them after having enjoyed them.”
A certain Grassi (Lombroso, op. cit., p. 12) was one night seized with sexual desire for a relative. Irritated by her remonstrance, he stabbed her several times in the abdomen with a knife, and also murdered her father and uncle who attempted to hold him back. Immediately thereafter he hastened to visit a prostitute in order to cool in her embrace his sexual passion. But this was not sufficient, for he then murdered his own father and slaughtered several oxen in the stable.
It cannot be doubted, after the foregoing, that a great number of so-called lust murders depend upon a combination of excessive and perverted desire. As a result of this perverse colouring of the feelings, further acts of bestiality with the corpse may result – e.g., cutting it up and wallowing in the intestines . . .
CASE 17. Jack the Ripper. On December 1, 1887, July 7, August 8, September 30, one day in the month of October and on the 9th of November, 1888; on the Ist of June, the 17th of July and the 10th of September, 1889, the bodies of women were found in various lonely quarters of London ripped open and mutilated in a peculiar fashion. The murderer has never been found. It is probable that he first cut the throats of his victims, then ripped open the abdomen and groped among the intestines. In some instances he cut off the genitals and carried them away; in others he only tore them to pieces and left them behind. He does not seem to have had sexual intercourse with his victims, but very likely the murderous act and subsequent mutilation of the corpse were equivalents for the sexual act.’
We may think that serial killers are a uniquely modern scourge, but the dozens of similar cases detailed in the Psychopathia Sexualis prove that the human capacity for evil has not diminished with our increased understanding of the human mind and ability to treat mental illness.
FBI file: profiling the Ripper
In 1988, exactly one hundred years after the Whitechapel murders, two FBI agents drew on their extensive experience of hunting serial killers to compile a psychological profile of Jack the Ripper. Special agents Roy Hazelwood and John Douglas approached the mystery as if it were a modern murder case, stripping away spurious speculation and the confusion created by numerous conspiracy theories to consider the case solely on the facts as recorded in the official police reports.
From the documented evidence, the location of the crime scenes and the nature of the attacks, the agents concluded that Jack was a white male in his mid- to late-twenties and possessed average intelligence. The fact that he went undetected was attributable to luck, not his cunning.
The Ripper was a habitual predatory killer who prowled the streets in anticipation of cornering a likely victim on whom he could indulge his perverted sexual fantasies. There was no pattern to the murders – they were spontaneous, opportunistic slayings. Such killers always stalk the same few streets, like a wild animal which has marked its territory. Had the police known at the time that the killer had a compulsion to repeatedly return to the scene of his crimes they might have been able to catch him in the act.
The Ripper’s background
His choice of victim, together with the nature of the mutilations, suggests the Ripper had been raised by a domineering female who is likely to have subjected him to repeated physical and sexual abuse. The effect of this would have been to create a child with sadistic, antisocial impulses, which may have driven him to torture animals and commit arson. Such tendencies would have continued into adult life when the Ripper would have exhibited extreme erratic behaviour, sufficient to provoke his neighbours and arouse the suspicions of the police. Therefore the authorities should have been looking for someone who had previously come to their attention for repeated acts of violence and irrational antisocial behaviour.
The Ripper was evidently single, had probably never married and was unlikely to have any friends. The fact that all the murders took place between midnight and 6am suggests that he was nocturnal by nature, lived alone and had no family responsibilities.
It is a fair assumption that he lived very close to the crime scenes, as predatory killers invariably start by murdering victims close to their homes, and it would appear that he knew the area well enough to carry out his crimes undetected and elude capture after being disturbed.
As for his appearance, he would have had poor personal hygiene and would have looked dishevelled, the very antithesis of the slumming gentleman of leisure cutting through the fog in top hat and cane envisaged in countless films and novels. If he was employed it would have been in a menial position and one in which he would have had little or no contact with the public. He was certainly not a professional man and, contrary to popular myth, the mutilations did not demonstrate medical knowledge, or even rudimentary surgical skill.
It is revealing that he subdued and killed his victims quickly as this indicates that the taking of a life was not of primary importance to him. The mutilations are the most significant clue to his state of mind. The murders were clearly sexually motivated and by displacing the victim’s sexual organs he was symbolically rendering them sexless and therefore no longer a threat. He clearly hated women and felt intimidated by them.
Using modern profiling techniques, Hazelwood and Douglas eliminated some of the prime suspects, notably Sir William Gull, and point the finger at one specific individual, Kosminski, whom they have confidently identified as Jack the Ripper.
Chapter 4: The Usual Suspects
On the evening of 10 February 1889 a short, neatly dressed man of European appearance walked into a Dundee police station and calmly informed the duty officer that his wife had committed suicide. When the police arrived at his home they found a woman’s body with severe injuries to the genitals and bruising around her throat. She had evidently been strangled and mutilated post-mortem. Moreover, the preliminary medical examination revealed that a second set of mutilations had been inflicted some time after the first by a sharp knife. The murderer had clearly returned to inflict more damage to satiate his sadistic appetite.
But that was not all. During their search of the premises the police found two curious messages
chalked by a back door. They read ‘jack ripper is at the back of this door’ and ‘jack ripper is in this seller’ (sic). Was it possible that the Whitechapel murderer had fled to Scotland for fear that the police were closing in and had his wife been silenced to prevent her revealing that she knew of his crimes?
Further investigation uncovered a trunk containing a belt mottled with old, dried blood and two cheap imitation gold rings of the type that had been torn from Annie Chapman’s fingers.
The trial of Jack the Ripper – William Henry Bury (1859–1889)
The name of the man they arrested and charged that night was William Henry Bury. During subsequent questioning detectives teased out more details which convinced them that the man they had in custody was more than just a wife murderer with delusions of notoriety.
He matched the description of the Whitechapel murderer given by several key witnesses. A photographic portrait taken in August 1888 shows Bury looking the very image of the man described by PC Smith and witness William Marshall in Berner Street on the day Elizabeth Stride was killed. He also fitted the psychological profile of the Ripper that would be drawn up by FBI profilers a century later.
A psychopathic personality
While still a boy Bury had witnessed his mother hauled off to a lunatic asylum and seen his father torn apart from groin to chin by the wheel of a cart – images which he may have been unconsciously exorcising during the Whitechapel murders. It has been said that Polly Nichols may have been killed simply because she was wearing a jacket with a picture of a man leading a horse, such associations being sufficient to trigger a violent response from a psychopathic personality.
According to contemporary accounts, Bury exhibited all the personality traits that define the psychopathic personality. He was a compulsive liar, a thief and suffered from acute paranoia. He carried knives with him for fear of being attacked and even slept with one under his pillow. He both feared and hated women and is thought to have caught venereal disease, possibly from his wife, Ellen Elliot, who continued to work as a prostitute despite having inherited £500 which Bury squandered on drink and other vices within a year of their marriage. That same year, 1887, they moved to Bow in London’s East End where Bury worked as a horsemeat butcher, a trade in which he could indulge his sadistic fantasies vicariously and perhaps even his need to avenge his father’s death, albeit on the carcass of dead animals.
More significantly, inquiries revealed that Bury could not account for his whereabouts on the nights of the East End murders and that he had exhibited signs of extreme agitation, behaving ‘like a madman’ after returning home on the night Annie Chapman had been killed. Whatever the reason for his unexplained nocturnal walks and bizarre behaviour, it is a fact that he sold his horse and cart in December 1888 shortly after the last Ripper murder and left London with Ellen in January 1889.
Final words
An indication of how seriously the police took the possibility of a ‘Ripper’ connection can be gleaned from the fact that Scotland Yard sent Inspector Abberline and another detective up to Scotland to assess the evidence and interview Bury in his cell. But Bury refused to confess. Even when the hangman stood before him he remained defiant. ‘I suppose you think you are clever to hang me,’ snarled Bury with venom. ‘But because you are to hang me you are not to get anything out of me.’ Evidently he was holding out for a reprieve in exchange for his full confession to the Whitechapel murders.
But was he the Ripper, or was this merely yet another of his warped, self-aggrandising fantasies? Abberline was apparently satisfied and is said to have told the executioner, ‘We are quite satisfied that you have hanged Jack the Ripper. There will be no more Whitechapel crimes.’ And that, at least, was true.
George Chapman (1865–1903)
Polish-born Severin Antoniovich Klosowski assumed the name of George Chapman in 1895 in a belated attempt to evade the unwanted attentions of the British authorities, who were beginning to suspect him of having murdered several of his former wives. In one of the few surviving photographs, he looks the image of the dapper gent with his long black moustache, but in reality he was a callous, manipulative and violent man with a spiteful streak. But was he Jack the Ripper?
Before emigrating from Poland in the spring of 1887 Klosowski had worked as an assistant to a surgeon in Svolen and so would have possessed the medical skill to have performed the crude operations on each of the Whitechapel victims. However, he must have failed to qualify as a doctor because when he came to England he worked as a lowly barber’s assistant. Eventually he owned a barber shop of his own at 126 Cable Street which was within walking distance of all the Whitechapel murder sites.
But by 1890 his business had closed and he was forced to work again as a barber’s assistant, this time in a barber shop on the corner of Whitechapel Road and George Yard, only yards from where Martha Tabram had been murdered. In April the following year he and his second wife, Lucy Baderski, emigrated to America, where he continued his philandering ways and when she confronted him with his infidelities he would beat her in a fit of temper. At one point he attacked her with a knife which persuaded Lucy to return to England alone. He followed her and they were temporarily reconciled but eventually separated. Over the following months he took a series of common-law wives, subjected them to physical abuse and murdered each of them in turn as soon as he had tired of them.
George Chapman
A proven murderer
At his trial in 1903 Chapman was proven to be a serial murderer and clearly capable of sporadic outbursts of violence. However, the main problem with Chapman’s candidacy as a Ripper suspect is that he murdered all of his wives by poisoning them and murderers rarely change their modus operandi, although it is possible if they believe that they risk capture by continuing their pattern of behaviour. This apparently did not bother Inspector Abberline, who is said to have congratulated his colleague Inspector Godley on Chapman’s arrest with the words, ‘At last you have captured Jack the Ripper!’ Apparently not dissuaded by the fact that Chapman was only 23 years old during the Autumn of Terror, much younger than any of the men that the witnesses had described, Abberline later explained his optimism in an article published in the Pall Mall Gazette while Chapman was awaiting execution.
‘I have been so struck with the remarkable coincidences in the two series of murders that I have not been able to think of anything else for several days past – not, in fact, since the Attorney-General made his opening statement at the recent trial, and traced the antecedents of Chapman before he came to this country in 1888. Since then the idea has taken full possession of me, and everything fits in and dovetails so well that I cannot help feeling that this is the man we struggled so hard to capture fifteen years ago . . .
As I say, there are a score of things which make one believe that Chapman is the man; and you must understand that we have never believed all those stories about Jack the Ripper being dead, or that he was a lunatic, or anything of that kind. For instance, the date of the arrival in England coincides with the beginning of the series of murders in Whitechapel; there is a coincidence also in the fact that the murders ceased in London when Chapman went to America, while similar murders began to be perpetrated in America after he landed there. The fact that he studied medicine and surgery in Russia before he came over here is well established, and it is curious to note that the first series of murders was the work of an expert surgeon, while the recent poisoning cases were proved to be done by a man with more than an elementary knowledge of medicine. The story told by Chapman’s wife of the attempt to murder her with a long knife while in America is not to be ignored.
One discrepancy only have I noted, and this is that the people who alleged that they saw Jack the Ripper at one time or another, state that he was a man about thirty-five or forty years of age. They, however, state that they only saw his back, and it is easy to misjudge age from a back view.
As to the question of the dissimilarity of character in the crimes which one
hears so much about, I cannot see why one man should not have done both, provided he had the professional knowledge, and this is admitted in Chapman’s case. A man who could watch his wives being slowly tortured to death by poison, as he did, was capable of anything; and the fact that he should have attempted, in such a cold-blooded manner, to murder his first wife with a knife in New Jersey, makes one more inclined to believe in the theory that he was mixed up in the two series of crimes . . . Indeed, if the theory be accepted that a man who takes life on a wholesale scale never ceases his accursed habit until he is either arrested or dies, there is much to be said for Chapman’s consistency. You see, [the] incentive changes; but the fiendishness is not eradicated. The victims too, you will notice, continue to be women; but they are of different classes, and obviously call for different methods of despatch.’
Chapman was hanged on 7 April 1903. Other factors in favour of him being the Ripper are that the murders began shortly after he arrived in England and stopped when he left; he had a regular job and was only free at the weekends when the murders took place; and he was known to have been walking the streets of the East End until the early hours. His insatiable sexual drive has been highlighted as a possible motive, but it could prove the opposite as the victims were not sexually assaulted. In fact, their mutilations indicate someone who was sexually inhibited and who could only exorcise his frustration through violence. Witnesses have described seeing a ‘foreigner’ in the company of some of the victims and this would match Chapman, but others claim to have overheard the supposed killer talking in English, which Chapman couldn’t have done at that time as his grasp of English was rudimentary to say the least.
Given all the facts, the case against Chapman is circumstantial at best and it is difficult to see why Abberline was so insistent that the Yard had finally got their man.