If The WM Occurred In ......

[How Brown]

Most are aware of the sentiments offered by Sir Robert Anderson in 1910 which are as follows:

"And if the police here had powers such as the French police possess, the murderer would have been brought to justice..." Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, March 1910.

First of all, and according to Anderson, the murderer had been institutionalized,if not to "justice" in that he never faced a jury. Lets get that out of the way...

So, dear reader...would the Ripper have been brought to justice in a nation which followed different legal procedures than Britain did? Would another nation's policing forces have taken the institutionalized character and put him on trial by means of other practices and policing standards? Even the Nazi's didn't execute insane or mentally diminshed murderers. Thats a fact.

Would the French have taken "Anderson's Suspect" to trial? How about the Russians or Portugese?

Talk it up.............

[Big Jon]

Bump it up!

[Pilgrim]

Would the French have taken "Anderson's Suspect" to trial? How about the Russians or Portugese?The French ?

Possibly. According to French Wikipedia Joseph Vacher was "sentenced with a certain haste, "without considering the severe medical antecedents". And...

An innocent was for a long time thought to be guilty of this crime. In order to clear him of this unjust suspicion Vacher's statements had to be made the object of a verification removing any doubt that the suspect was in fact innocent.

Alexandre Lacassagne, Vacher l'éventreur et les crimes sadiques (http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k77016g.pdf)

...

The Russians ?

Andrei Chikatilo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Chikatilo)

In 1978, Chikatilo moved to Shakhty, a small coal-mining town near Rostov-on-Don, where he committed his first documented murder. On 22 December, he lured a nine-year-old girl to an old house which he had secretly purchased, and attempted to rape her but failed to achieve an erection. When the girl struggled, he stabbed her to death. He ejaculated in the process of knifing the child. From that point, Chikatilo was only able to achieve sexual arousal and orgasm through stabbing and slashing women and children to death. Despite evidence linking Chikatilo to the girl's death, a young man, Alexsandr Kravchenko, was arrested, tried and confessed under torture. He was eventually executed for the crime.

Six bodies had been uncovered by 1983. A Moscow police team, headed by Major Mikhail Fetisov, was sent to Rostov-on-Don to direct the investigation. Fetisov centered the investigations around Shakhty and assigned a specialist forensic analyst, Victor Burakov, to head the investigation. The police effort concentrated on mentally ill citizens and known sex offenders, slowly working through all that were known and eliminating them from the inquiry. A number of young men confessed to the murders, although they were usually mentally handicapped youths who had admitted to the crimes only under prolonged and often brutal interrogation. One under-age homosexual suspect committed suicide in his detention cell.

...

[How Brown]

Dear Pilgrim:

Thanks very much for presenting these two cases. There's another Russian serial killer case...the Gennadiy Mikasevich case which outdoes the one Russian case you mentioned.

In that series of crimes beginning in 1971 and ending in 1985....4 different men were convicted for Mikasevich's skein of murders. In order to capture the creep, 312,000 passports were traced to finally nail him. He was similar to the BTK Killer ( who had access to many people's home security files and also worked as a glorified dog catcher ) in that he worked under the umbrella of the Soviet apparatchik as the Chief of the State Motor Vehicle Repair Works...and as a police volunteer.

Thanks again,Pilgrim....two great examples of non-Brit justice.

[Big Jon]

Do we know what powers french police had at the time which made him so certain they'd have more luck? Something like powers of arrest or search or something?

[How Brown]

Big:

I am not 100 percent sure...but I am pretty sure the French police did not have to "mirandize" their detained persons. They also...and again I am going by memory here...and it may be a faulty one at that... had the ability to search and seize where the Brits had to go through certain procedures. Sir Charles Warren refused a request to bypass legal procedures during the WM at one point...something his contemporary detractors must have let slip by when they harangued him on a daily basis.

[Big Jon]

I'm wondering what the history of the rights of arrest are. I'll have to look that up.

Though in Britain we no longer have a right to remain silent.

[String]

But even if the French did things different than the British they still had to catch the guy and I don't think the British police really knew who the ripper was. Did the French use better forensics or other methods of detection?