Jack the Ripper identified

Post Reply New Topic

Kosminski had appeared as so mentally compromised by mental illness by 1891 when he had been finally institutionalized permanently, but that doesn't mean he had been in that frame of mind when the Ripper murders were taking place. It's actually not so uncommon for serial killers and other psychopaths to disintegrate so completely after a few years if they are not able to find victims, especially if mental illness is involved. Back when I was a kid, Spokane had had the South Hill Rapist, AKA Kevin Coe, who had come across as cool, manipulative, and calculating. And yet, after he had been convicted and sent to prison, when the realization had dawned on him that he no longer had women to sexually prey on, he suffered a mental breakdown. Kosminski had been sent for shorter intervals to work houses and an asylum between his identification as Jack the Ripper and his final incarceration, during which time he was being closely watched by the police, and he apparently knew he was under watch, which would have made committing terrible murders and mutilations impossible, and would have been a living hell for him. The fragile string holding on his mask of sanity would have broken, causing said mask to eventually and permanently fall away. My point is, the street person who ate garbage off the street because of his paranoid fear of eating food given to him by other humans, who had auditory hallucinations, and who refused to speak English anymore, was probably not always who Aaron Kosminski was. In fact, that he had only a few years before worked as a barber reveals that his mental state had been considerably healthier at one time.

/\ /\ Yes, but the victims of the Ripper were cut in such a way that it is generally agreed The Ripper had to have a good understanding of anatomy. Thats why doctors were suspected, as was that bloke who was a butcher. (Leather Apron ??)

John Pizer, aka Leather Apron actually had been a shoe maker - when he wasn't extorting money from prostitutes at knife point. And while he had been a suspect, he actually had been in jail at the time of one of the murders, making it very unlikely for him to have been Jack the Ripper.
While it's popular to say that the Ripper had to have had medical knowledge, the truth was, he just brutally sliced the poor women open and pulled stuff inside the body to outside the body. Not much medical knowledge needed in reality to do that.

Whilst I'm aware that police at the time thought he had anatomical knowedge, all the books I've read on the subject seemed to suggest that this theory had become discredited in recent decades.

I would suppose they thought The Ripper had anatomical knowledge, not because of how he removed organs, but the speed he worked at. He cut them up rather quickly. Its possible he just cut and cut and did so at random.

That's what I think. And he doubtlessly had fantasized a long time about murdering and mutilating women before he had gone out and done it.