Tabram & Her Stays

[How Brown]

Thread for discussion...and in particular for folks who tend to consider Martha Tabram a bona fide Ripper victim based on the following:

None of the other Ripper victims ( Kelly and Stride included,although they are not universally accepted as such ) wore stays or a corset.

Nina and I were pondering whether Tabram's killer...when in the midst of contemplating evisceration...might have been frustrated enough to skip the idea altogether.

Anyone care to discuss this concept?

The amount of time the act of killing her took might be indicative of two things to me.

One,is that like the other victims,Ripper or otherwise and excluding Stride...there is definite overkill due to the amount of time expended on each of the women...again,excluding Stride.

However,could Tabram wearing a corset account for the time ( I did a little test 2 years ago and it took up to 30 seconds from initial stab to completion...on a block of semi-rigid urethane,of course,not a co-worker.) expended on her by her killer?

[Dan Norder]

Polly Nichols was wearing stays when she was murdered, and Tom Wescott argued in his article "Old Wounds" (Ripper Notes #26) (http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/rn-old-wounds.html) that it could explain the differences with the later murders.

[How Brown]

Dan:

I just realized the mistake...Nichols was wearing a corset.

While you're at it...what do you make of the idea of her corset hindring or preventing an evisceration?

Thanks for checking the thread out.

[Dan Norder]

Sorry for the delay in getting back to this, How.

I think it'd plausible that corsets or stays could hinder the progress of a knife. I don't know when the Ripper first thought of the idea of gutting his victims or removing parts, though. He might have tried that from the start, or he may have come up with that idea somewhere as he went along.

[How Brown]

Never a problem,Dan...its the Yule season and Santa Claus must be served.

Nina mentioned to me that stays wouldn't be much of an obstacle ( I understand it from reading Wescott's article a while back that he apparently felt it might be a minor obstacle in the Nichols case )....since it was cloth and not much thicker in gauge than regular clothing if a sharp knife was being used to rip and rend, to mutilate Nichols. Perhaps an interruption occurred to prevent the intended complete mutilation or as you mentioned, the intention of an Eddowesesque mutilation came to him later on,like one week later in the case of Chapman.

I had the feeling when I did my little pseudo-scientific experiment a few years back in stabbing some polyurethane to replicate the wounds on Tabram that she may have used a bone corset and that this might have caused the "shallow" wounds on her torso....and that Dr.Killeen may have not considered the bone corset being the cause of these "shallow" wounds.

In other words,had Tabram been wearing simple cloth stays,then the wounds would have been deeper and his declaration of a "pen knife" being employed would have been inaccurate.

As we know,when a knife hits anything which gives resistance,the blow or striking with the blade will often veer off to one side... I know first hand having cut my left index finger tip off in 1978 on a knife edge machine blade but fortunately it was reattached,as it glanced off the bone in my fingertip and a complete removal of the fingertip,bone and all,was avoided.

Anyone else?