Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  Unlike the other victims, this victim was found indoors, on her bed, lying on her back, wearing a linen undergarment pushed up to her waist, her legs wide apart and knees turned outward. The left arm was close to the body, with the forearm flexed at a right angle and lying across the abdomen. The right arm was slightly abducted from the body and rested on the mattress. The elbow was bent, the forearm supine with the fingers clenched. Her clothing was neatly folded on a chair by the bed.

  The throat was cut through right down to the vertebrae, the fifth and sixth being deeply notched. The air passage was cut at the lower part of the larynx through the cricoid cartilage.

  The face was gashed in all directions, the nose, cheeks, eyebrows and ears being partly removed. The lips were blanched and cut by several incisions running obliquely down to the chin. There were also numerous cuts extending irregularly across all the features.

  Both breasts were removed by circular incisions; the muscles down to the ribs were attached to the breasts. The skin and tissues of the abdomen from the coastal arch to the pubic area were removed in large flaps. The right thigh was denuded in front to the bone, including the external organs of reproduction and part of the right buttock. The left thigh was stripped of skin, fascia and muscles to the knee. The left calf showed a long gash through skin and tissues to the deep muscles and reached past the knee to five inches above the ankle. Both arms and forearms had extensive and jagged wounds. The right thumb had a superficial incision about one inch long and there were abrasions on the back of the hand. The lower part of the right lung was broken and torn away; the left lung was intact. The surfaces of her abdomen and of her thighs were removed, and her abdominal cavity had been emptied of viscera. The uterus and kidneys were found, along with one breast, under her head. Her other breast was found by her right foot, and her liver between her feet. Her intestines were placed by her right side and her spleen was placed by the left side of her body. The flaps removed from her abdomen and thighs were found on the table. Her face was mutilated beyond recognition and her neck was severed to the bone. Further examination revealed that the pericardium had been opened and her heart had been removed. It was not found.

  Death was due to the throat wound, and most of the mutilation was believed to be postmortem.

  THE “SIXTH” FIRST VICTIM

  Professional criminologists, police investigators and experienced profilers who review the eight Whitechapel murders—or the eleven Whitechapel murders if we include an additional two murders of women in 1889 and one more in 1891—conclude that there were six Jack the Ripper victims, not five.11 Jack the Ripper’s noncanonical sixth victim would really be his first victim, murdered three weeks before the first of the “canonical five.”

  Martha Tabram, Tuesday, August 7, 1888, thirty-six years old, was found at about four forty-five a.m. on a first-floor landing of the George Yard Buildings tenement off a narrow north-south alley called George Yard connecting Wentworth Street and Whitechapel High Street. Tabram was last seen by a fellow prostitute after the two of them paired off with two soldiers in a pub and she left with her client at about eleven forty-five p.m. At about three thirty a.m., her body was seen by a witness returning home from a night job, but in the dimly lit landing, he mistook her for a sleeping vagrant and paid no attention to her. A person leaving for work in the morning called the police after finding Tabram. Despite numerous attempts, the two soldiers were not successfully identified.

  The victim was found lying on her back, with her dress pushed up to her waist. Her legs were drawn up and open, the feet resting on the ground and the knees turned outward.

  There were 39 stab wounds: 9 in the throat; 5 in the breast area—3 in the left lung, 2 in the right lung and 1 in the heart, which would have been fatal; 5 in the liver; 2 in the spleen; 6 in the stomach; and 9 in the genital area.

  Only one of the wounds, to the heart, was produced by a long dagger or bayonet, while the remaining wounds were inflicted with a smaller knife, possibly a folding penknife.

  Because there were no facial wounds, no slashing of the throat or torso and no mutilation or organ harvesting, all of which characterized the later murders, many amateur ripperologists dismissed Martha Tabram from the canon of victims, but most professional investigators and criminologists today include the Tabram murder. The fact that the perpetrator might have stabbed Tabram in the throat rather than slashing her as he did the other victims does not automatically exclude her from the canon.

  The anomalies in the Tabram murder when it is compared with the later five murders can be attributed to the possibility that this was Jack the Ripper’s first murder. Unlike the other murders, it might not have been planned, which might account for why it occurred on a Tuesday, while the later murders each took place on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday. Perhaps something happened unexpectedly between the killer and the victim, sparking an unplanned murder and unleashing an addictive bloodlust for more, as often happens in serial-killer cases. After his first murder the killer embarks on a cycle of fantasy killings that are “improved upon” with every repetition in a learning process. But the first murder often looks like an anomaly in the series precisely because it is unplanned, unlike the murders that follow. The first murder is often closer to home than an offender would ever intend, and it may look hesitant and incomplete in its fantasy signature, disorganized and improvised.

  PROFILING JACK THE RIPPER IN 1888

  Are you wondering how Jack the Ripper might have been pursued in modern times with all the techniques available to law enforcement today? Certainly, the science of DNA analysis and identification could have narrowed the suspect list. But, perhaps surprisingly, criminal psychological and crime-scene profiling had been attempted back in 1888 and in more than just rudimentary form.

  The first attempt to psychologically profile Jack the Ripper was in September, when the alienist Dr. L. Forbes Winslow inserted himself into the case, and wrote to the Times:

  That the murderer of the three victims in Whitechapel is one and the same person I have no doubt. The whole affair is that of a lunatic, and as there is “a method in madness,” so there was method shown in the crime and in the gradual dissection of the body of the latest victim . . . I think that the murderer is not of the class of which “Leather Apron” belongs, but is of the upper class of society, and I still think that my opinion given to the authorities is the correct one—viz., that the murders have been committed by a lunatic lately discharged from some asylum, or by one who has escaped . . . one who, though suffering from the effects of homicidal mania, is apparently sane on the surface, and consequently has been liberated, and is following out the inclinations of his morbid imagination by wholesale homicide.12

  When referring to the “three victims” in his letter, Winslow was, as the newspapers did at the time, including the Martha Tabram murder with the two later, “canonical” murders of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman. Dr. Winslow in his time was so bitten by the ripperology bug and focused so tenaciously on his favorite suspect, the so-called “lodger” from Canada, G. Wentworth Smith, that police at some point began to suspect Winslow himself of being Jack the Ripper.

  What arguably might be the first police-sponsored attempt in history to produce an official crime-scene profile of an unidentified serial killer came from police surgeon Dr. Thomas Bond on November 10, 1888, following the murder of Mary Jane Kelly.13

  Dr. Bond concluded, “All five murders [he didn’t include Martha Tabram] were no doubt committed by the same hand . . . the women must have been lying down when murdered and in every case the throat was first cut . . . in all the cases there appears to be no evidence of struggling and the attacks were probably so sudden and made in such a position that the women could neither resist nor cry out . . . in all the murders, the object was mutilation.”

  Dr. Bond then ventured a psychological profile of the serial k
iller:

  The murderer must have been a man of physical strength and of great coolness and daring. There is no evidence he had an accomplice. He must in my opinion be a man subject to periodical attacks of Homicidal and erotic mania. The character of the mutilations indicate that the man may be in a condition sexually, that may be called satyriasis. It is of course possible that the Homicidal impulse may have developed from a revengeful or brooding condition of the mind, or that Religious Mania may have been the original disease, but I do not think either hypothesis is likely. The murderer in external appearance is quite likely to be a quiet inoffensive looking man probably middle aged and neatly and respectably dressed. I think he must be in the habit of wearing a cloak or overcoat or he could hardly have escaped notice in the streets if the blood on his hands or clothes were visible.

  Assuming the murderer to be such a person as I have just described 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. Such persons would probably be unwilling to communicate suspicions to the Police for fear of trouble or notoriety, whereas if there were a prospect of reward it might overcome their scruples.14

  Thomas Bond’s historic attempt at criminal profiling was an admirable effort hampered only by the lack of statistical behavioral data to guide him. That would take another one hundred years, until John Douglas, Robert Ressler and Ann W. Burgess completed their sexual homicide survey, which established the first rudimentary statistical database on which FBI profiling techniques would be based.

  Jack the Ripper’s “Surgical Skill”

  There was a lot of speculation at the time that, given the serial killer’s “surgical skill,” he could be a physician. Several physicians who examined the mutilated bodies, with the missing kidneys, uterus, heart and other organs, which the Ripper harvested, were quoted or described as commenting:

  There were indications of anatomical knowledge . . . I believe the perpetrator of the act must have had considerable knowledge of the position of the organs in the abdominal cavity and the way of removing them. It required a great deal of medical knowledge to have removed the kidney and to know where it was placed. The parts removed would be of no use for any professional purpose . . .

  He thought he himself [the examining physician] could not have performed all the injuries he described, even without a struggle, [in]under a quarter of an hour. If he had done it in a deliberate way such as would fall to the duties of a surgeon it probably would have taken him the best part of an hour.15

  Of course this all depends on the assumption that Jack the Ripper was looking specifically for a kidney or a uterus when he cut those victims open; with more experience of serial killers, we can see the possibility that he just blindly “ripped” the victims, exposing a smorgasbord of organs like slimy appetizers on a tray, to take and taste what caught his eye without knowing what it was, snatching at whatever came into his hand or slipped and slid loose from under his knife’s edge as he ripped and tore through a bloody stew of spilled guts, kidneys and liver. You don’t have to be a surgeon to be a butcher, and before supermarkets and refrigeration, even in an urbanized center like London, you did not have to be a butcher to have butchered. Lots of people had experience with gutting and butchering fresh meat.

  The London police surgeon Dr. Thomas Bond, who produced the November 1888 “official” profile of Jack the Ripper, dismissed all notions of the killer having surgical skills, or even a butcher’s skill, arguing, “The mutilation was inflicted by a person who had no scientific nor anatomical knowledge. In my opinion he does not even possess the technical knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterer or any person accustomed to cut up dead animals.”16

  PROFILING JACK THE RIPPER TODAY

  One of America’s veteran serial-homicide investigator-profilers, Robert Keppel, tackled the Jack the Ripper case in 2005. Keppel, today an academic, was an investigator with the Washington State Attorney General’s office and was one of the investigators in the Ted Bundy and Green River Killer serial murders.17 Keppel co-opted Bundy to help him profile the Green River Killer, an episode that partly inspired the scenes in The Silence of the Lambs between FBI trainee Clarice Starling and serial killer Hannibal Lecter.18

  Keppel states that while a serial killer’s method of operation (MO)—what he needs to do to accomplish the crime—changes as he learns and develops, and even the pathological “rituals” he performs at the crime scene can change, the fantasy “signature”—what he does not need to do, but compulsively does—behind the rituals will always be the same.

  In his analysis Keppel points out that after killing his likely first victim, Martha Tabram, Jack the Ripper probably learned to manually strangle or choke the victims from behind, lower them to the ground in an unconscious state with their heads typically pointing to his left, kill them by cutting their throats and, finally, having gained complete possession and control of their bodies, proceed to mutilate them.19 (We often forget that Jack the Ripper was a necrophile, a “warm-destructive” on Lee Mellor’s scale of necrophilia [see chapter seven].) This strategy prevented him from being splashed by the victim’s blood while her heart was pumping, as he must have been when he attacked his first victim, Tabram, from the front. Prior to the last victim, the murders all occurred outdoors in the darkest hours, between midnight and morning, and the victims were left at the scene. After he was interrupted by passersby in his attacks on Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, he adjusted his MO, killing and mutilating his next victim, Mary Jane Kelly, indoors without risking interruption again.

  The static signature of Jack the Ripper was his piquerism—his use of a knife to slash open and penetrate in a mimicry of sexual intercourse. According to Keppel, Jack the Ripper was gratified by violence, dominance, control, bleeding, penetration, evisceration, destruction and ultimately the complete possession of the victim, including the harvesting of their internal organs. That was what turned him on.

  Jack the Ripper’s static signature is evident in eleven characteristics that shift in and out of the evolving MO:

  Except for the last one, the victims were all middle-aged prostitutes or former prostitutes with severe long-term alcohol addiction who were seen drunk in the hours before their murders. The victims, in investigative parlance, were in a “high-risk” category: they were already “less alive” before Jack the Ripper even laid eyes on them;

  The crimes all displayed various degrees of piquerism, which escalated from the stabbing of the first victim’s breasts and genital area to the “extravagant” mutilation and organ harvesting of the sixth victim. Not all the victims were exposed to the same amount and type of mutilation, but there was an escalation from the first to the last victim. The more he killed, the more he did things that were not necessary to perpetrate the murder, and did them in an escalating intensity;

  The perpetrator immediately and completely incapacitated, subdued and took control of the victims in a “blitz” type of attack from behind, silencing them first through asphyxiation or strangulation, lowering them to the ground and then killing them by cutting their throats with such impatience and urgency that he nearly decapitated some of his victims. The killing was just a chore, a means to an end, the wringing of a chicken’s neck in anticipation of a fine meal; the mutilation and evisceration were pure butchery—a Lycaon’s Shepherd’s Pie of guts—the sacrificial Abomination;

  The perpetrator showed signs of “overkill” by inflicting an excessive number of potentially fatal wounds beyond the minimum necessary to incapacitate or kill his victims;

  There was no primary penetrative sexual assault on the victims;

  The victims were not tortured before b
eing killed;

  All the homicides occurred within a quarter mile of one another and, except for the first, noncanonical homicide, occurred late on weekend nights;

  The perpetrator left his victims in the open with no attempt to cover or conceal the bodies or forestall their discovery. The one body that was left indoors was the one that was most excessively mutilated;

  Except in the murder of Stride, during which he was interrupted, Jack the Ripper posed his victims lying on their backs with their legs apart and skirts hiked up in a degrading “sexual” position to be found in the open where they were killed and mutilated. The victims were posed as if they were having sexual intercourse. Some of the victims’ clothes were rearranged, possessions were laid out near some of the victims’ bodies and their internal organs and body parts were used in horrifically weird tableaus created by the killer;

  The killer’s objective was to spend more time alone with his victims to enjoy acting out his compulsion and to escalate his violence and postmortem mutilation and harvesting of body parts. He amputated the breasts of his last victim and attempted to sever her legs at the thigh and knee. Each uninterrupted killing was characterized by an escalation of the mutilation and violence. Aside from complete decapitation, amputation or dismemberment, by the sixth victim there was very little room left for further escalation. That may be why Jack the Ripper stopped, if he stopped of his own accord. (Serial killers have been known to “retire,” as in the cases of Albert DeSalvo, Gary Ridgway and Dennis Rader, the “BTK Killer”);