Jack the Curious-But-Yellow?

Excerpted from Murder Most Foul:

"For heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself"
- William Heirens(?)

¡§A man who has been behind bars more than 50 years in a sensational Chicago murder case asked a clemency board to free him Thursday, claiming he was railroaded. Heirens was a 17-year-old student at University of Chicago when he was arrested in the slayings of a 6-year-old girl, whose remains were found scattered in the Chicago sewers, and two women. The message "For heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself" was found scrawled in lipstick on the mirror in one of the women's home.¡¨
- Associated Press, April 05, 2002

If the Ripper were committing these murders in hope to be caught by the police, then he certainly had an odd way of facilitating it, seeing as how absolutely no known clues or messages of any kind were left at any of the murder scenes. Surprisingly, there are people who do believe that the Ripper was doing exactly that ¡V ¡¥crying for help¡¦ ¡V and have stated so publicly on the Message Boards of Stephen Ryder¡¦s Casebook10:

¡§This could well be a cry for help, as in: 'I'm widely acknowledged as a great axe man, I wear a top hat on occasion, and wherever I go, Jack is always with me. Can't you see the clues I'm giving you dudes? I'm Jack! It's me!¡¨
- Graham Sheehan10

But there are also people who believe that the Ripper killed his victims in a ¡¥humane¡¦ manner, and have also stated so on these same Message Boards:

¡§Basically I don't think he was an evil man, he was a man tormented and pushed to extreme thoughts and his mind couldn't cope with the right and wrongs of it. His method of killing could show he wanted to be humane about it. Some may say he cut their throats in a savage fashion, but it may be he wanted to be sure they died instantly, [that they didn't suffer death slowly]. He was humane, he killed with such violence because he wanted to be sure their deaths were instant, - he didn't want them to linger and suffer unnecessarily, even if he had no feeling for them. Sometimes, if not every time, he cut the throat twice to be sure.¡¨
- Warwick Parminter10

One wonders about how these same people might receive premise #16, although their probable political affiliation should not be a mystery to anyone. Yet, there may be some merit to the premise that the Ripper was indeed ¡¥crying out¡¦ for help via commission of these murders. It may just be that he really wasn¡¦t very good at it, or maybe he did leave obscure clues, ones that went unrecognized and/or unnoticed by the investigating authorities. Readers of the purported Maybrick diary will recollect the various ¡¥clues¡¦ mentioned in that narrative, such as the cotton in the tin match box. Did subtle clues of this nature lie among the crime scenes and evidence that was collected at the time, clues that have now been lost to us forever?

Surprisingly, a criminologist no less august than John Douglas, author of The Cases That Haunt Us, has shown support for the concept of the Ripper ¡§crying for help¡¨, by comparing the tagline of the Lusk letter, ¡§Catch Me When You Can¡¨, to the message allegedly left by William Heirens. He does qualify his support, however, by stating that it is equally probable that the Lusk letter tagline was intended as a taunt toward Lusk and the authorities.

Conclusion ¡V if the Ripper were actively trying to be caught, then he went about it in a most peculiar fashion. Given the utter lack of clues at any of the murder scenes, and so few overall, one must suspect the veracity of an alleged motive such as this. However, he would not have hesitated to kill, mutilate, and then abandon his victims in public, just to prove to the authorities that he was ¡¥serious¡¦. His other motives for mutilation and leaving of the victims in public could have been as follows:

Mutilation

„h Jack the Bogeyman
„h Jack the Wanker
„h Jack the Jill-Hater
„h Jack the Human-being Stalker
„h Jack the Anarchist

Public Display

„h Jack the Bogeyman
„h Jack the Anarchist
„h Jack the Godfather



SOURCES:

1. Badal, James In the Wake of the Butcher

2. Bloch, Robert Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper

3. Crime SuspenStories, The Giggling Killer
EC Publications

4. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan The Complete Sherlock Holmes
5. Futrelle, Jacques The Thinking Machine
6. Jesse, F. Tennyson Murder and its Motives
7. King, C. Daly The Curious Mr. Tarrant
8. Maples, William Dead Men Do Tell Tales
9. Rumbelow, Donald The Complete Jack the Ripper
10. Ryder, Stephen www.casebook.org
11. Scott, George A History of Torture
12. Sledge, Eugene With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
13. Smithsonian Magazine, The Shadow of a Gunman from World War II
September 1993

14. Spitz. Werner, Medicolegal Investigation of Death, Second
and Fisher, Russell Edition

15. Styron William The Confessions of Nat Turner

16. Sugden, Philip The Complete History of Jack the Ripper

17. Ubelaker, Douglas Bones: A Forensic Detective¡¦s Casebook

18. von Krafft-Ebing, Richard Psychopathia Sexualis

19. http://www.crimelibrary.com

20. http://drugs.uta.edu/drugs.html

21. http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v3n1/ridgway.html

22. http://65.107.211.206/

23. http://www.wcb.vcu.edu/wcb/students/...s/poecrit.html

24. http://www.daveschultz.com/scum/clinton/bodycount.html

25. http://www.sociology.org/vol003.002/...icle.1998.html

26. http://www.psycharts.com/impofthe.htm

27. http://www.stormloader.com/thescorpion/17evil.html

28. http://www.ihr.org/books/ztn.html

29. http://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v281...jbk0609-1.html

30. http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf065/sf065p14.htm

Add this to your long list of other web sites below your long post:

http://www.bushbodycount.com

He is definitely a serial killer of some sort. It runs in the family as has done for generations.

Since you listed a site about Clinton then you should have the one for Bush also.

George

Hello, George:

Well, I guess I could have used your suggestion if Bush were intent on reforming society instead of destroying it. He is a dope, no two ways about it. I didn't vote for him last time and I sure won't next time. But he is hardly in Bill and Hillary's class so far as this kind of thing goes, and I wouldn't doubt for a second that Hillary herself was directly involved in Vincent Foster's "suicide". BTW, your comment really belongs in #16, not here.

I'm more inclined to think it is a "cry for attention", then an actual "cry for help". You know the old saying :"If you can't be 'famous'. Be 'infamous'."

Well, it sure worked if it were that way; so much so that attention still hasn't died down after nearly 116 years. A real success story.

Either way, this concept is pretty unlikely, coming in just ahead of "A.R." in the probabilities.

But you have a valid point, and maybe this one should be called "A Cry for Help or Attention".

[WRITEFX]

Ok How, I'm reading the archive and found this.

Do you agree with any of the posts below? Were the murders a cry for help from a very sick man that knew he was out of control, or was it just attention seeking egotism?

[Howard Brown]

Dear WFX:

Actually,I do not think the Ripper cared as much about being seen as we might assume he would have been...and I don't think he attempted to cry out for help.

How about anyone else ? Thanks for bringing this up WFX...Nice thread.

[Stan Reid]

Yes, Heirens has been in for over 62 years now and appears to be in good enough shape to do another 20 years if he doesn't get out. I'm not sure if he's innocent but, when you see him on TV, as a human being, it's difficult not to feel some sympathy for him. There's no doubt that he was abused by police during his interrogation in 1946.

By yellow, do you mean Jack was a coward? That's what it means here in the States. Not wanting to be caught certainly isn't being a coward, it's the way all smart and sane criminals behave.

Although I believe that Hierens at least claimed that the "cry for help" had been written by a journalist?

Certainly Jack the Ripper was a coward, in every understanding of the word. No one but a coward would be capabe of such atrocities.

[WRITEFX]

Hi Stan, your question about yellow, I didn't write the first post of the thread.