Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  The attacks were organized, with the perpetrator bringing his own knife to the scene and leaving with it. Jack the Ripper probably had a serial killer’s “kill kit” that contained the knife and possibly disguises and anything else he felt he would need to commit his murders. Jack the Ripper left behind at the scene no tangible evidence that was detectable in that era, no witness conclusively glimpsing him red-handed with knife in hand or fleeing. Having dismembered at least four women on sidewalks and pavements in spans of ten to fifteen minutes, he then slipped through highly trafficked and crowded areas unseen and somehow unbloodied (or covering the blood up). He appeared to have an intimate familiarity with the streets of Whitechapel and their traffic patterns and rhythms in the night hours in order to pass through them invisibly. Many people probably looked at him; very few saw him. This serial killer was comfortable in Whitechapel because he belonged in it, because it was his home, where he lived and worked.

  In FBI parlance, Jack the Ripper would be a mixed category of “unsub” (unknown subject) showing both organized and disorganized personality traits: organized because he brought his weapon to the scene; disorganized because he struck at targets of opportunity by “blitzing” them; organized because he chose a hunting ground dense with the same targets of opportunity; disorganized because it was his own home ground; organized because he carefully chose the dark of night to strike; disorganized because he killed in open, public areas and was interrupted on multiple occasions; organized because he learned to take his last victim inside; disorganized because it took him so long to figure out to do that. Jack the Ripper was cunning but crazy.

  In 1988, FBI profiler John Douglas took a crack at applying what the Behavioral Sciences Unit had recently learned from interviewing serial killers to profiling Jack the Ripper. Douglas ignored the “Jack the Ripper” letters because they were unauthenticated.

  He developed the following profile of the unsub:

  Between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-six;

  Does not look out of the ordinary;

  At the time of the assaults would not wear his everyday clothing, because he wanted to project to unsuspecting prostitutes that he had money;

  Raised by a domineering mother and weak, passive and/or absent father;

  Likelihood his mother drank heavily and enjoyed the company of many men;

  As a child did not receive consistent care and contact with stable adult role models;

  Detached socially and developed a diminished emotional response toward fellow humans;

  Asocial and prefers to be alone;

  Internalized anger and in younger years expressed through setting fires and acts of cruelty toward animals;

  Fantasies of domination, cruelty and mutilation of women;

  Employed in a trade where he could work alone and vicariously experience his destructive fantasies. Employment could include work as a butcher, mortician’s assistant, medical examiner’s aid or hospital attendant;

  Employed Monday through Friday, and on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday is off from work [Douglas was unaware of the six-day workweek of the Victorian era. This illustrates the pitfalls of profiling into the distant past.];

  Carried a knife routinely for self-defense;

  Paranoid-type thinking with poor self-image. Might have some physical abnormality although not severe. Might be below average weight or height, or have problems with speech, scarred complexion, physical illness or past injury;

  Probably not married but if married then to someone older than himself and the marriage lasting a short duration;

  Not adept in meeting people socially, and the majority of his heterosexual relationships would be with prostitutes. Likely infected with venereal disease, untreatable in that era, which could further fuel his hatred and disgust for women;

  Would be perceived as being quiet, a loner, shy, slightly withdrawn, obedient and neat and orderly in appearance and when working;

  Drinks in local pubs, and after a few drinks he becomes more relaxed and finds it easier to engage in conversation;

  He lives and works in the Whitechapel area. The first homicide should be in close proximity to either his home or workplace;

  Would not have committed suicide after the last homicide. Generally, when crimes like these cease it is because the perpetrator came close to being identified, was interviewed by police or was arrested for some other offense.20

  In other words, in the view of an FBI profiler, it is unlikely Jack the Ripper was a top-hatted upper-class surgeon or physician, or prominent artist or Prince Albert, although he might have dressed up to lure his prostitute victims and perhaps even wore a cape to cover any bloodstains on his clothing. His social ineptitude meant that dressing well would have helped him draw women to himself rather than his having to approach them and risk being seen; however, it is unlikely that he dressed in formal evening wear as he is frequently portrayed doing in iconic imagery.

  Jack the Ripper was most likely an anonymous denizen of Whitechapel, of a similar social class as his victims, a colorless and shy Gary Ridgway, as opposed to a charismatic, outgoing Ted Bundy. Since 1888 some five hundred suspects have been nominated as Jack the Ripper by amateur investigators, journalists, ripperologists, criminologists and both amateur and professional historians.21 The London Metropolitan Police website identifies only four “official” suspects seriously considered by the original official investigation, all names familiar to any ripperologist:

  “Kosminski,” a poor Polish Jewish local resident in Whitechapel, today identified as twenty-three- or twenty-four-year-old Aaron Kosminski, a hairdresser residing in Whitechapel with a history of mental illness;22

  Montague John Druitt, a thirty-one-year-old barrister and schoolteacher who committed suicide in December 1888;

  Michael Ostrog, a Russian-born multipseudonymous thief and confidence trickster, believed to be fifty-five years old in 1888, and detained in asylums on several occasions;

  Dr. Francis J. Tumblety, fifty-six years old, an American quack doctor who was arrested in November 1888 for offenses of gross indecency, and fled the country later the same month, having obtained bail.23

  The suspect Aaron Kosminski certainly fits the profile generated in 1988 by John Douglas at the FBI. But since the 1990s, a new generation of criminal profiling techniques has risen to the forefront: geoforensic profiling. When geoforensic techniques are applied to the Whitechapel murders, one of the suspects looks especially good.

  RAPTOR: GEOPROFILING JACK THE RIPPER, AND OCKHAM’S RAZOR

  One of the newest tools in serial-homicide investigation is geoprofiling, or geoforensic profiling, an investigative technique that began to gain traction in the 1990s with the ubiquitous availability of inexpensive but powerful computers. Interpretive-intuitive psychological profiling based on crime-scene analysis produces a hypothetical suspect profile only as good as the individual profiler. In contrast, geoprofiling relies on empirical data and mathematical algorithms, which ferret out where the actual suspect is most likely to be “anchored”—the location of his home or workplace—by following “bread crumbs” from the crime scenes back to the suspect’s home base and comfort zone.

  The premise behind forensic geoprofiling is that serial criminals tend to commit crimes not too close to their “anchor” for comfort, but not too far into unfamiliar territory either. Once the location of three or more serial offenses can be linked to a single perpetrator and triangulated, the place between too close and too far can be calculated with geoforensic algorithms. With multiple crime scenes, a probable anchor can sometimes be calculated down to a 150-square-yard area. (The algorithms were originally formulated in the 1940s by Gestapo mathematicians and psychologists to geoprofile the homes o
f individuals clandestinely distributing anti-Hitler leaflets and painting graffiti in Berlin. They worked very well.)24

  In its early form, geoprofiling was based on a simple circle hypothesis that says serial offenders live within a circle whose diameter is equal to the distance between the two murder sites farthest from each other. Various studies confirm this hypothesis. For example, from a sample of 126 American serial killers, 89 percent lived within a circle defined by their two body disposal sites farthest from each other, and 86 percent of 26 British serial killers sampled also met the circle hypothesis.25

  Kim Rossmo, one of the pioneers of geoforensic profiling, classifies serial offenders as either stalkers, who seek out their victims in a comfort zone territory, or raptors, who attack their victims more or less randomly upon encountering them in a territory they frequent.26 These factors—combined with a serial killer’s place of employment or lack of employment, marital status, children’s age, entertainment and dining tastes, addictions, hobbies, sports activities, mode of travel, road system, geography, land use and zoning and infrastructure—all have an impact on where his home base gets centered. Some serial killers will go out specifically to hunt and stalk, while other serial killers keep an eye out for potential victims while they are routinely shopping, running errands or on their way to work, a factor that geoprofilers include in their algorithmic variables.

  The behavioral mathematics involved in geoprofiling serial killers involves not only the perpetrator’s movement, but the victim’s as well. The movement of both victim and offender through different geographical spaces leading to their encounter has a social, cultural and historical dimension to it, shaping and nurturing not only the serial killer through time and geography but any individual’s likelihood to be targeted by a serial killer. Geoprofilers have identified a matrix of five distinct, mutually exclusive offender-victim geographic encounter patterns:

  Internal: victim and offender share the same territory;

  Predatory: offender invades the victim’s territory;

  Intrusion: victim enters the offender’s territory;

  Offense mobility: victim and offender share the same territory but the offense takes place elsewhere;

  Total mobility: victim and offender live in different territories and the offense takes place in a unique third territory.27

  Offenders can be marauders, committing their crimes in areas that they frequent in the course of day-to-day life, or they can be commuters, traveling from their home base to a specific area that they do not otherwise visit in their routine activities.28

  Today geoprofiling is highly evolved, and it is recognized that it is not only serial killers who move and strike in a mathematically discernible pattern but also terrorists, smugglers, illegal migrants (targeted today by LBIMP—Land Border Illegal Migration Profiling systems), sharks, mosquitoes and epidemic diseases.29 Rossmo advocated to US forces during the Iraq War the utility of geoprofiling to link locations of urban insurgency graffiti to insurgent home bases.30

  One of the compelling aspects of geoprofiling is its effectiveness in profiling cold cases of serial murder going back decades or even centuries. Jack the Ripper crime-scene data has been fed into the new generation of geoprofiling systems, which take into account variables of pre-automobile movement and all the other historical factors that would have influenced the algorithms. The big question remaining is whether Jack the Ripper was a stalker or a raptor, a marauder or a commuter.

  Serial killers of prostitutes have historically been “commuters” who travel to areas frequented by them, and while London had many places like that, without a doubt Whitechapel had a highly concentrated number of the skid-row prostitutes the Ripper seemed to prefer. It is therefore possible he was a “commuter” into Whitechapel, and the potential suspect list therefore is large and unwieldy, as is his geoprofile.

  But if he was a marauder-raptor, then current geoprofiling software locates the perpetrator of the five canonical Jack the Ripper murders in a 150-square-yard area with its anchor around Flower and Dean Street in the heart of Whitechapel.31 And if you include the “first,” perhaps unplanned murder, of Tabram, that just nails the anchor more tightly to that same location.

  Add to that the age-old principle of Ockham’s razor in problem-solving: “If there are a number of possible solutions, the simplest one, based on the fewest assumptions, is most likely to be correct.” Aaron Kosminski, who lived in the heart of Whitechapel, or somebody very much like him, most likely was the serial murderer known as Jack the Ripper. It’s the simplest solution, with the fewest assumptions. Robert House gives in “Aaron Kosminski Reconsidered,” on casebook.org, a very detailed and persuasive argument for Kosminski’s candidacy based on all the recent geoprofiling advances.32

  Kosminski or not, Jack the Ripper as a serial killer was “special” in a very real way—not just because of his notoriety in the center of the newspaper capital of Britain, but by serial-killer behavioral standards even today. Robert Keppel, who designed a computer system for Washington State to track and link murder cases—Homicide Investigation Tracking System (HITS)—ran Jack the Ripper data through the system, comparing the Whitechapel murders signature and MO characteristics with 3,359 murder cases in the HITS database. In Washington, home to mega serial killers like Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer and Robert Yates, the HITS system found no match with the same combination of signatures and MO that Jack the Ripper had. Only by subtracting various characteristics did he find a rare few comparable murders. Keppel reported:

  There were only nine cases in the database in which the victim’s body was probed, explored, or mutilated, six of them females, only one being a prostitute. There are only two cases, both females and neither a prostitute, that contain both characteristics of unusual body position and explored, probed, or mutilated body cavities. More significant, there are no cases where the body of a prostitute displayed both characteristics of unusual body position and explored, probed, or mutilated cavities.33

  Jack the Ripper was indeed a rare monster. He was a unique necrophile lust serial killer deserving of the cult of ripperology so obsessed with identifying the man behind the monster. It is unlikely, however, that we will ever conclusively determine his identity.

  Whether the investigation of the 1888 Whitechapel murders was bungled is debated by ripperologists familiar with the intricacies of the two rival police departments investigating the case (the London City Police and the London Metropolitan Police) and the frenzied competition among London’s newspapers to cover the case. To all their credit, there was little linkage blindness in this case; the murders were quickly recognized as the work of a solo serial killer, even though the term was not available to describe him as such. How much better the London police might have been able to investigate the Whitechapel murders had current forensic sciences like fingerprinting, geoprofiling and DNA testing been available to them, one can easily speculate.

  LUST KILLERS: “THE INSANE DIALOG OF LOVE AND DEATH IN THE LIMITLESS PRESUMPTION OF APPETITE”

  What historical or social factors might account for the gathering storm of lust serial killers in the nineteenth century? Firstly, sex was driven underground. While prostitution itself was long condemned, sexuality in general before the mid-nineteenth century was much more open. As late as the 1860s it was still respectable for upper-class Victorians in Britain to bathe in the nude at public beaches, although “bathing booths” could be wheeled out into the sea for privacy.34 Twenty years later, by the 1880s, such a thing would be unthinkable.

  Author and social critic Colin Wilson suggests that two factors may have played a role in the rise of sadistic sexual serial murder in the late nineteenth century: the expansion of the female workforce and a new sexual sensibility reflected by the emergence of a certain type of pornographic literature.35

  Wilson argued that today every man knows that most of the women
he encounters in the city are unavailable to him. However, during much of the nineteenth century, the reverse was true. Thousands of impoverished, urbanized women turned to prostitution and were available to any man with a coin in his pocket. But by the last decades of the nineteenth century, it was discovered that women made better typists than men did, that they were excellent shop clerks, and so on. The new middle classes were also hiring thousands of young women as domestic servants. Now men were faced with a large population of gainfully employed and unavailable women, to which was added the Victorian-era philosophy that sex beyond procreation was something unnatural and unhealthy. Women became taboo objects of a forbidden desire—a guaranteed formula for a volatile cocktail of confused and lethally misdirected libido.

  Furthermore, the nature of pornographic literature suddenly changed, reflecting the new, repressive Victorian antisex culture. In previous centuries, both erotic literature and images portrayed sex explicitly and freely. Sex was something to be indulged in sensually, with gusto, like a good meal. But in the nineteenth century, pornographic literature began to take its cue from the Marquis de Sade. It described sex as something forbidden—a taboo to be overcome only through voyeurism, illicit seduction, bondage, force and rape. In the nineteenth-century pornographic novel, the virtuous Victorian woman could enjoy sex only if she was overpowered and forced into it.