Imprinting ? I gotcha $%#! imprinting RIGHT HERE

[SirRobertAnderson]

There's an interesting thread on the Casebook about imprinting....i.e. was your view of the Case 'imprinted' by the first book you read.

But I'd like to hone in more specifically on one aspect, where I do believe we are all 'suffering' from imprinting: our view of the Letters.

We've all read the classics, and they all intone one point: the Letters are fakes. It's become a given in the field.

I'm not saying any of them are legit. I'm saying I don't know. I'm saying I'm agnostic. But what I'm REALLY saying is we've all been imprinted.

What say ye, folks ?

[kelly]

I've definitely not been imprinted. Sure, as a whole, as a body of work, the letters are the rantings of a group of various kinds and levels of crazies. However, there is always the distinct possibility that one of them (a random overlooked one even) may be the real thing.

I think the same can be said for the tip-off letters written by the nosy old people who thought their neighbor or friend was creepy enough or weird-looking enough to be JTR. One of those creepy guys could have happened to be the right man.

The problem is, it's just about impossible to investigate any of those claims so far after the fact.

[SirRobertAnderson]

I think the same can be said for the tip-off letters written by the nosy old people who thought their neighbor or friend was creepy enough or weird-looking enough to be JTR. One of those creepy guys could have happened to be the right man.


Not to mention that many of the letters haven't been widely available; they're on microfiche. I seem to recall Stewart Evans saying he had transcripts of them all, but most of us have not read the majority of the 'my-Uncle-How-is-the-hell-fiend-you-seek' letters, which might be a worthwhile point of investigation.

Sure, as a whole, as a body of work, the letters are the rantings of a group of various kinds and levels of crazies..

Indistinguishable from many Forums postings, in other words. :behindsofa:

[Robert Linford]

Just out of interest : did the police get any crazy telegrams?

[Howard Brown]

I think the same can be said for the tip-off letters written by the nosy old people who thought their neighbor or friend was creepy enough or weird-looking enough to be JTR. One of those creepy guys could have happened to be the right man. --Kelly

Amen to that Kel.

[Dan Norder]

Yeah, like I said in a recent book review and over the years, I think the field as a whole has swung way too far over to the side of automatically rejecting the idea that the killer wrote any letters thanks to the combination of the most famous Ripper profile having claimed that the killer was too disorganized to have been interested in such a thing and the research into the comments by police that they thought they knew that a specific journalist was behind the most famous letters. Some widespread and respected authors focus on that, and suddenly most everyone ruled out pretty much all the letters.

Not that we need to swing all the way over to Cornwell territory either, mind you...

[SirRobertAnderson]

Yeah, like I said in a recent book review

Well worth a repost here. I highly recommend this book....forces one to rethink many of the assumptions folks make about the Ripper. Hickey stopped and restarted more than once, killed victims of both sexes and widely different ages.....and liked to write.


—

The Postcard Killer
Vance McLaughlin, PhD

Type: Paperback, nonfiction
Length: 231 pages
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8 inches
Publisher: Thunder’s Mouth Press
Release date: Sept. 2006
ISBN: 1-56025-909-4
List price: $16, £8, CDN$20

Reviewed by Dan Norder
(as printed in Ripper Notes #27, © 2007)

I strongly believe that the best way to determine what might have happened during the Whitechapel murders is to make comparisons with other known serial killers. This isn’t to say that any particular one that we could pull out of a hat necessarily shares much with our boy Jack, but looking into the range of what was known to have happened in other cases at least gives us a better idea of what is plausible in this one. All too many people seem to want to make declarations that the Ripper would or would not have done one thing or another based upon a very limited knowledge of the kind of things serial killers really do. Dr. Vance McLaughlin’s book about American murderer J. Frank Hickey, The Postcard Killer, will, I think, challenge a number of people’s strongly held beliefs on this topic.

For instance, after a century or so in which most people believed Jack the Ripper wrote letters about his crimes to the police the general consensus within the field lately has moved away from that idea. This stems, I think, from a famous criminal profiler’s claim that the real killer simply wouldn’t have been interested in such things and because the statements from Scotland Yard officials crediting the most famous alleged Ripper missives to a journalist became more well known. The gray area here is that there were a lot of letters that claimed to have come from the killer other than the specific ones that got the most press, and several murderers have, in fact, written such messages.

McLaughlin’s book goes into detail about many of the bizarre cards Hickey wrote (and his article in Ripper Notes #26 did so for some other Victorian killers as well) which seemed to serve no real purpose other than to cause pain and suffering to the family of his victims and possibly to try to throw investigators off the track. There is a mixture of both truth and bizarre inexplicable falsehoods in these messages, and I have to wonder from looking at them how we can hope to determine which – or if any – of the alleged letters from Jack the Ripper were real.

Hickey’s first known murder was committed a number of years before the Autumn of Terror, but he remained at liberty until 1912 until his depraved crimes and outrageous actions finally caught up with him. His normal choice in victims was boys that he would molest and then kill if he thought he had to cover it up – this of course is a major difference with the Whitechapel murders, so a direct comparison of many aspects of the crimes may not be possible. An item that was particularly interesting to me, however, is that before Hickey was known to have been a killer of boys he was a suspect in the unsolved murder of a woman who was attacked while walking through the woods. Conventional wisdom has it that a killer doesn’t stray from his preferred victim type when there is a clear pattern, but in this case it just seems like it would be too much of a coincidence to think that he wasn’t responsible for this one as well.

The one thing that struck me as the most surprising out of the whole book was just how many times the police had run across Hickey acting in extremely suspicious ways and how many times he was considered a suspect in a murder and then forgotten about until his luck just ran out. Police can certainly be excused, I think, for not being able to put everything together, especially when there were other suspicious individuals running around at the same time as well as the typical annoying drunks admitting to the murders and wasting the police’s time.

Oh, and about those drunks... one of those who confessed but later recanted was Hickey himself!

Yes, that’s right, the actual killer told the police he did it and was believed to be innocent because he was considered just another harmless weirdo under the influence of alcohol and looking for attention. Think about that, and then start trying to count up how many drunks confessed to the Whitechapel murders but have always been assumed to be mere distractions unworthy of any serious attention as Ripper suspects. Can we really be sure? Was one of those men the person we’ve been looking for all these years but just never gave a second thought to?

I strongly recommend McLaughlin’s book as a way of rethinking those beliefs that just have always been left unquestioned, and also as a fascinating look into the previously forgotten crimes of a Victorian serial killer.

†††

[Howard Brown]

Even though some people in the community may not agree with the premise that Dan stipulates ( a comparison of the WM to or with other cases throughout history...), I think we all do that from time to time,regardless of some sort of "stand" we make when we read or ponder the Case.

Like with Hickey and his letter writing to the concept of JTR actually writing a letter or two, I do that with the Ripper and Chikatilo sometimes. I'm sure some others have their 'comparison' examples with the Ripper.

Thanks for reposting Dan's review,Bob.

[Adam Went]

IMO, Jack really is responsible for atleast a few of those letters - in particular, From Hell.

As I was just talking about on another thread, Jack had to have been someone who didn't appear too different to everyone else outwardly - not someone who would attract attention to himself amongst other people. If he was the type of person who craved attention (and let's face it, even the most inept of people would know that if you kill and mutilate 5 - if not more - women, everyone's going to be talking about you), he may have thought that by sending mail such as the From Hell letter and kidney, he would get more of that attention, and he would be able to do more than just kill the women.

Again, the question over whether the letters are real or not brings us back to another point, and that is how clever Jack was. Was he literate? Could he have written letters like that? Based on the small amount of solid information we have, I think he was reasonably smart without being brilliant.

Obviously some of the letters are simply ridiculous, but it's always possible as well that he sent some of the letters that haven't even been looked into much yet....it's always the one you least expect! ;)

Cheers,
Adam.

[kelly]

Just out of interest : did the police get any crazy telegrams?

There's an appendix in Evans/Rumbelow's Scotland Yard Investigates that briefly lists the sender and contents of all of the city letters. I could swear that at least a few are telegrams. I'll double check, but anybody here with one close at hand (I'm at work) could see.

[Robert Linford]

Thanks Kelly. No need to check. I have a copy - I haven't read it yet.:ohwell:

[Dustin Gould]

I try not to allow myself to be "imprinted". Doing so would be counter-productive to my interest in the case, and directly goes against the scientific principles we're supposed to abide by.

Regarding the letters, deciphering authenticity from copycat is virtually impossible. I feel if any of the letters is authentic, it's the "From Hell" letter. But to play "Devil's Advocate", a truly twisted f@#k with a warped sense of humor, and access to human remains, could just have easily sent that letter. DNA was non-existent. Dr. Openshaw reported the kidney accompaning the letter was very similar to the one removed from Catherine Eddowes, but couldn't say for sure it belonged to her. Being diseased from excess alcohol consumption, it could have come from anyone in Whitechapel suffering from the same vices as Eddowes.

[Dan Norder]

Dr. Openshaw reported the kidney accompaning the letter was very similar to the one removed from Catherine Eddowes, but couldn't say for sure it belonged to her. Being diseased from excess alcohol consumption, it could have come from anyone in Whitechapel suffering from the same vices as Eddowes.

What the papers originally claimed Openshaw said and what he later said on the record don't really match up. In fact he explicitly denied that he had ever said the vast majority of the things the papers had claimed he said. The idea that the Lusk kidney was a "ginny kidney" seems to have come from the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee or a reporter and not Openshaw himself.

[Mags]

I was certainly imprinted by Tom Cullen's book way back at the dawn of time. It was the only book I could get my hands on and I read it over and over.

Dan makes a good point that there are large swings of the pendulum in how we view the case. Right now we seem to be at a point of boundless skepticism, where we doubt just about everything. I'm waiting for the post-or have I missed it- about how there was no JTR at all and all the "victims" were one offs .

[Dustin Gould]

What the papers originally claimed Openshaw said and what he later said on the record don't really match up. In fact he explicitly denied that he had ever said the vast majority of the things the papers had claimed he said. The idea that the Lusk kidney was a "ginny kidney" seems to have come from the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee or a reporter and not Openshaw himself.

Dan...Pardon my ignorance....But just to be sure: By "ginny kidney", you mean a kidney ravaged by alcohol abuse?