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Authors: Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman
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the Ripper. More than that, it was a clamorous, overpowering need, a compulsion , which overruled all other considerations that night – personal safety included. Such criminal characteristics were so rarely encountered in the late nineteenth century as to be wholly incomprehensible to the average police officer, no matter how experienced. Outside the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes or Sergeant Cuff, most investigative thinking then was directed towards far more elementary criminal motivation.
Thanks to the FBI’s criminal investigative technique – based on the behavioural analysis of violent crime – the clues which abound in those 1888 murders point clear as a signpost to the type of person responsible. The main traits so far identified, i.e. the repetitive, sadistic nature of the crimes; the targeting on each occasion of an identical kind of ‘stranger’ victim (a prostitute), with all five murdered in the one general area; and the evident planning behind the murders, from attack to escape, stamp the Ripper unmistakably as a serial killer.
The same research has also established that the serial killer is to a large degree sexually motivated, and often decides in advance on the type of victim he intends to target (as opposed to specific individuals); so that the crime may be a true ‘stranger murder’ in all respects. (‘Stranger murder’ is a term often used by the American press to describe serial killing.) Since the selective process must turn on the psyche of the murderer concerned, it follows that the range of possible serial murder victims will encompass the whole spectrum of society; from the youngest infant to the aged and infirm, and from the wholly respectable to the brazenly disreputable.
Although his victim may be a random choice, the serial killer may nonetheless have planned the murder with considerable care. Once decided on the type of person he intends to kill, he will possibly stake out a specific locale: a shopping precinct, perhaps, or a school playground, an old folks’ home, a singles bar, a lonely bus stop – or busy main road even, if hitchhikers are his target – to await or cruise for those victims of opportunity likely to be encountered there. Moreover, before he launches his first attack he is likely to have methodically reconnoitred the locale – his way in and way out, nearby traffic lights, roundabouts, one-way streets, any factor likely to impede his getaway in an emergency – until satisfied he has a practical escape route available. Such a precaution will be doubly important if the serial killer intends to abduct his victim and dispose of the body elsewhere.
Given obvious changes in traffic conditions, the same characteristics may plainly be seen in the Ripper’s behaviour one hundred years ago. Prostitutes were the type of people he elected to murder, and Whitechapel was the locale he staked out for victims of opportunity. That he knew his way well through those gas-lit alleys is self-evident; no matter how close the hue and cry, he got clean away each time without once being stopped for questioning. Over the years, a number of theories have been expounded as to why the Ripper murdered (women) prostitutes only. Sexual motivation aside, the most popular has always been that he was some kind of moral avenger: a man who dealt out rough justice to all whores, because one had infected him (or some close relative) with syphilis. On the other hand his twentieth-century counterpart Peter Sutcliffe, alias ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’, who murdered thirteen women over six years on the assumption all were prostitutes, claimed that a voice from the grave told him that he had a God-given mission to do so. Sutcliffe had in fact once worked briefly as a grave-digger: however, his plea was rejected by the trial court as a ruse to try to obtain a lenient sentence.
The simplest and perhaps most likely explanation may be that prostitutes have always presented an easy, and even obvious
Thanks to the FBI’s criminal investigative technique – based on the behavioural analysis of violent crime – the clues which abound in those 1888 murders point clear as a signpost to the type of person responsible. The main traits so far identified, i.e. the repetitive, sadistic nature of the crimes; the targeting on each occasion of an identical kind of ‘stranger’ victim (a prostitute), with all five murdered in the one general area; and the evident planning behind the murders, from attack to escape, stamp the Ripper unmistakably as a serial killer.
The same research has also established that the serial killer is to a large degree sexually motivated, and often decides in advance on the type of victim he intends to target (as opposed to specific individuals); so that the crime may be a true ‘stranger murder’ in all respects. (‘Stranger murder’ is a term often used by the American press to describe serial killing.) Since the selective process must turn on the psyche of the murderer concerned, it follows that the range of possible serial murder victims will encompass the whole spectrum of society; from the youngest infant to the aged and infirm, and from the wholly respectable to the brazenly disreputable.
Although his victim may be a random choice, the serial killer may nonetheless have planned the murder with considerable care. Once decided on the type of person he intends to kill, he will possibly stake out a specific locale: a shopping precinct, perhaps, or a school playground, an old folks’ home, a singles bar, a lonely bus stop – or busy main road even, if hitchhikers are his target – to await or cruise for those victims of opportunity likely to be encountered there. Moreover, before he launches his first attack he is likely to have methodically reconnoitred the locale – his way in and way out, nearby traffic lights, roundabouts, one-way streets, any factor likely to impede his getaway in an emergency – until satisfied he has a practical escape route available. Such a precaution will be doubly important if the serial killer intends to abduct his victim and dispose of the body elsewhere.
Given obvious changes in traffic conditions, the same characteristics may plainly be seen in the Ripper’s behaviour one hundred years ago. Prostitutes were the type of people he elected to murder, and Whitechapel was the locale he staked out for victims of opportunity. That he knew his way well through those gas-lit alleys is self-evident; no matter how close the hue and cry, he got clean away each time without once being stopped for questioning. Over the years, a number of theories have been expounded as to why the Ripper murdered (women) prostitutes only. Sexual motivation aside, the most popular has always been that he was some kind of moral avenger: a man who dealt out rough justice to all whores, because one had infected him (or some close relative) with syphilis. On the other hand his twentieth-century counterpart Peter Sutcliffe, alias ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’, who murdered thirteen women over six years on the assumption all were prostitutes, claimed that a voice from the grave told him that he had a God-given mission to do so. Sutcliffe had in fact once worked briefly as a grave-digger: however, his plea was rejected by the trial court as a ruse to try to obtain a lenient sentence.
The simplest and perhaps most likely explanation may be that prostitutes have always presented an easy, and even obvious
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