The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (7 page)

Mary Jane Kelly, the last of the Ripper’s victims and the only one found dead in her room, suffered the most bizarre mutilation.
On this one unhurried occasion when, having changed his
modus operandi,
he ran less risk of being disturbed, the Ripper’s mutilation of the body was more elaborate than hitherto.
The room measured only twelve feet square, so that every detail loomed large.
Kelly’s throat was cut so deep she was all but decapitated, drenching sheets and palliasse in blood.
She was dressed only in her chemise.
The rest of her clothes were found folded on a chair, while other items of female clothing – including a skirt and hat – had been burned in the grate, apparently to provide light for the ritual mutilation.

The Ripper cut off the wretched woman’s nose and both breasts, and – as if they were trophies – displayed them on the bedside table, together with strips of flesh carved from her thighs.
Her forehead was flayed, the abdomen ripped open, her uterus and liver cut out.
The uterus had vanished: the liver was left for the police to find, neatly positioned between Mary Jane Kelly’s feet.
In a final, symbolic gesture the Ripper had taken one of the woman’s hands and thrust it deep inside her gaping belly.

Only Elizabeth (‘Long Liz’) Stride – the first of his two victims to die on 30 September 1888 (hence the night of the ‘double event’) – was spared mutilation.
This was not from any sense of compassion on the Ripper’s part, but strictly to save his own skin.
Bruises found on Stride’s shoulders and collarbone indicated where he grabbed hold of her before dragging her to the ground.
A single sweep of his knife was enough to sever her windpipe (all five of his victims died in this way, with their throats slit right to left).
On this occasion, however, as he knelt to rip open Stride’s abdomen, he was disturbed and forced to flee – possibly by the approach of a horse and cart, whose driver (a steward in a nearby working men’s club) first discovered the still warm corpse.

The Ripper wasted little time in stalking a replacement prostitute victim.
Within the hour, and only half-mile away in Mitre Square, Aldgate, he accosted and murdered streetwalker Catherine Eddowes – who ironically had just been released from Commercial Street police station.
In the words of Constable Watkins, the ‘peeler’ who found her body, the crime scene revealed by his bull’s-eye lantern resembled nothing so much as ‘the slaughter of a pig in market’.
A curious feature of this murder was that the Ripper placed part of the intestine between her left arm and body.

Pathologist Dr F.
Gordon Brown commented that the abdominal cuts had ‘probably been made by one kneeling between the middle of the body’, and said there had been little or no bleeding since they were inflicted after death.
However, Kate Eddowes had also sustained multiple facial wounds (one of which severed the tip of her nose), while the gash in her throat ran almost from ear to ear.
‘All the vessels in the left side of the neck were severed,’ said Dr Brown, ‘and all the deeper structures in the throat were divided down to the backbone.
Both the left carotid artery and jugular vein were opened, death being caused by haemorrhage from the cut artery.’

Such an attack would undoubtedly have left bloodstains on the Ripper’s hands, cuffs, some outer clothing and, very probably, his boots (elastic-sided boots were widely worn in 1888).
He evidently paused afterwards to wash his hands in a sink in the passage north of the Square; the bloodstained water was still visible when Major Smith, the acting City Police Commissioner, arrived on the scene.
The Ripper’s disciplined conduct in the wake of his earlier street murders indicates a calculated awareness of the risks he ran.
Each mutilation, carried out at the murder scene, was a ‘high risk’ situation, and he made off fast afterwards with his body-part souvenirs.
If that was an obvious precaution to take, his ability always to make his way apparently unnoticed through ill-lit streets and alleyways – burdened by the urgent need of a wash at very least, and most likely a change of clothing – speaks of methodical advance planning on the Ripper’s part.

Furthermore, on the night of 30 September 1888, his awareness of the hue and cry certain to follow the discovery earlier of Stride’s body half a mile away would have been doubly acute: this was a time when Ripper-mania was at its height in dockland London.
And yet – on this one occasion when the ritual mutilation had been denied him – he now took an even greater risk by remaining in the same general area
and
committing a second murder within the hour.
Not content with that, he also made time to sever and remove the coveted body parts from this second victim before attempting to flee: no easy task in any circumstances, on that darkened strip of pavement where Eddowes was murdered.
As Doctor Brown revealed at the inquest, ‘The left kidney was completely cut out and taken away.
The renal artery was cut through three-quarters of an inch . . .
the membrane over the uterus was cut through and the womb extracted, leaving a stump of about three-quarters of an inch.
The rest of the womb was absent – taken completely away from the body, together with some of the ligaments . . .’

The conclusion must be that the ritual was of supreme importance to 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 target for the sexually-motivated killer.
They symbolise carnality; they actively invite an approach, often touting for custom; and no potential ‘high risk’ victim ever risks injury or death more readily than by entering the nearest dark alleyway with a total stranger.
Because of widespread poverty, and the influx of workless Irish and East Europeans into Britain in the late nineteenth century, the Ripper’s chosen killing ground at Whitechapel was notorious for prostitution.
He could guarantee to find victims of opportunity there on every foray he made: whores were as thick on the ground in the East End at night as were the fleas in their doss-house bedding.

Hindsight apart, contemporary written evidence exists which appears to confirm that the Ripper had targeted whores as his intended victims
before
he committed at least three of the five murders attributed to him.
In a letter, thought to be genuine, to the Central News Agency in London and post-marked 27 September 1888 (i.e.
three days before the ‘double event’, and six weeks before the murder of Mary Jane Kelly), the writer – who signed himself ‘Jack the Ripper’, thus coining the immortal nickname – declared: ‘I am down on whores and shan’t quit ripping them till I do get bucked’.

This trait, of first choosing a
type
of victim to murder and then staking out a likely locale in which to trawl for them, can be identified time and again in the behaviour of modern serial killers.
Dennis Nilsen, the thirty-seven-year-old homosexual British civil servant and serial killer, prowled the ‘gay’ bars of Soho for four years between 1979 and 1983 looking for homeless, vulnerable youths.
His
modus operandi
was to ply each ‘pick-up’ with drink, offer him a bed and then strangle him with his tie as he slept.
Next morning he would either secrete the body beneath the floorboards of his home in Muswell Hill, north London, or dismember it and dispose of the pieces elsewhere.
Each murder left Nilsen ephemerally replete but wholly unmoved, like a spider despatching a fly.
He described his reaction after he deposited victim number ten (and third corpse to be dealt with in this way) under the floorboards.
‘That was it.
Floorboards back.
Carpets replaced.
And back to work at Denmark Street’ (the offices of the Manpower Services Commission).
Sheer carelessness in disposal of body parts led directly to Nilsen’s arrest.
His practice was
to boil the severed heads, or burn them with the trunk and limbs on bonfires and flush the lesser remains down the toilet.
Instead he blocked the drains – and was caught.

Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, scoured the red-light districts of Bradford, Leeds, Sheffield and elsewhere during a six-year search for victims prior to his arrest in 1981.
Like Jack, he targeted prostitutes: and in that period he intercepted thirteen ‘victims of opportunity’ – by no means all of whom were streetwalkers – and killed them all with exceptional violence.
His compulsive urge to murder whores led him to presume that every woman he encountered in those areas where he lay in wait was a prostitute: in fact, five of the thirteen were respectable passers-by.
All were subjected to the same degree of violence, and most of the bodies were mutilated after death.

On one occasion Sutcliffe returned to the murder scene days after the attack, and further mutilated the still-undiscovered body by attempting to sever the head with a hacksaw.
To return to the scene of the crime is a common behavioural characteristic in certain serial killers.
They do so for a variety of reasons: to check on the progress (if any) made by the police, to relive the fantasy which inspired the murder, and to commit acts of further mutilation and/or necrophilia.

Prime importance is placed by FBI analysts on the role of fantasy in serial murder.
Detailed, ongoing research shows that some convicted serial killers enact violent fantasies – including acts of murder – in their minds at seven and eight years of age, occasionally even earlier.
These aggressive daydreams continue to develop and expand through adolescence into manhood, the age when their violent dreams are usually first translated into the physical act of killing.
(Some serial killers commit murder in their teens.
In the next chapter we discuss one youth who committed four murders by the age of fifteen: pp.
129–31, The Profilers.)

Serial killers are almost invariably found to have experienced environmental problems in their early years.
In many cases they stem from a broken home in which the parents are divorced or separated, a home with a weak or absent father-figure and dominant female, sometimes a home-life marked by a lack of consistent discipline.
As policemen and probation officers have long known, the psychological damage resulting from such a deprived or miserable childhood all too often manifests itself in a number of recognisably aggressive traits.
They include defiance of authority, theft, persistent lying, acts of wilful destruction, arson, cruelty to animals and other children; with such symptoms accompanied by long periods of daydreaming (or fantasising) – that ever-available trapdoor leading into a private, make-believe world where the unhappy young can shape their revenge on society for all ill-treatment, real or imagined.