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Jack the Abused Child?
Excerpted from Murder Most Foul:
Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.
- Proverbs 22:6
And, of course, the reverse of the proverb is also true. For an illustration, we need look no further than the tragic childhood of Henry Lee Lucas:
¡§Henry, his brother, and at times his father, were witness to his mother¡¦s sexual escapades with whatever "customer" was present at the time. At times his mother would insist that Henry and his brother watch her having sex, to the point where she would punish them if they attempted to leave or look away.¡¨19
A similar example of the probable effect of a bad environment in the creation of a serial killer is that of Peter Kurten, who grew up in a one-room apartment where his father would beat and essentially rape Peter's mother in front of their 10+ children.
The environment in which a child is raised is, of course, tremendously important in shaping the child¡¦s future as an adult. Although aberrations do occur, as in the case of Jeffrey Dahmer, most others follow a fairly predictable path in the journey from child to adult. A child raised in a specific environment will, most likely, mirror that environment as an adult. Thus, the child raised in a dysfunctional environment may largely be expected to be dysfunctional himself. The author personally knows a young man, a prison inmate in Texas, who was raised in a family in which incest was commonly practiced at all levels. When he reached adulthood, the end results were all too predictable ¡V he has been incarcerated for sexual assault. The dysfunction can become second nature, regardless of what it is, as witnessed by the recent events at a family-owned crematorium in Georgia. There, the man who was in operation of the facility had, as a child, always been around death and decay. Dead bodies and rotting corpses had apparently been everyday objects in his youth, and, as an adult, he kept hundreds of corpses in various stages of dissolution, even going so far as to take digital photographs of them to store on his computer for later review. Even more unusual was the total lack of any evidence of necrophilia; it was apparently never a factor in his actions. He simply liked having the dead around him, because they had always been around him.
Killers, and serial killers in particular, have often had emotional problems with their parents, especially their mothers, that seem to have caused critical and destructive personality changes later in life:
¡§Men are what their mothers made them.¡¨
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a too-young boy is seduced or raped by a woman ¡V and it has happened ¡V or exposed to sexual activities too soon in life, he may grow up hating sex and those women who promote it. Naturally, what women promote sex more than prostitutes?
¡§A prostitute was found murdered. During the investigation the defendant stated that his mother had been a prostitute, and during his childhood he had frequently witnessed her in the company of male partners. Following this, he had developed a deep hatred for women and desired only to inflict pain upon them.¡¨14
Criminal history also indicates that if the mother¡¦s own attitude about sex is abnormal, the chances are that the son¡¦s will be abnormal as well:
¡§Ed Gein had an twisted relationship with his mother in which he viewed her as a angelic saint-like deity/goddess. She would force the view of "sex and women are the devils work" and kept him at home as much as possible. Ed basically committed his ghoulish deeds in order to "deal" with his suppressed sexuality and interest in women and also his "hatred" toward them because of his mother's anti-sexual views.¡¨19
Rumbelow writes of social conditions in London¡¦s East End at the time of the Whitechapel Murders, conditions that the Ripper himself may very well have experienced as a child. The excellent introductory section ¡¥Outcast London¡¦ of Rumbelow¡¦s book paints a stark picture of what life may have been like for our young master Jacky:
¡§Here is a mother who turns her children into the street in the early evening because she lets her room for immoral purposes until long after midnight, when the poor little wretches creep back again if they have not found some miserable shelter elsewhere.¡¨9
Combine crushing poverty, an alcoholic and abusive ¡V or absentee - father, and a prostituting mother, possibly a sadistic one such as Henry Lee Lucas had, and it would have been a sure recipe for creating violent dysfunction and emotional problems, possibly even resulting in a psychopath or sociopath. So likely is this occurrence of events and so attractive is their premise, that many Ripperologists are convinced that it must be so. One chatter visiting The JTR Chatroom during one of the recent structured chat sessions guaranteed everyone present that the Ripper¡¦s mother had been a prostitute ¡V period ¡V in spite of there being absolutely no known evidence of such whatsoever. For him, it simply had to be that way, and we were all wasting our time discussing other possibilities, suspects, and motives.
A bad environment could certainly manifest itself in numerous ways other than discussed thus far. Who knows the ultimate effect that it would have upon a child, other than to be terribly detrimental in some fashion? Following is discussion in this vein:
This <the paragraph following> is from Peter Constantine's translation of The Undiscovered Chekhov, Forty-Three New Stories. It was previously published as part of a Chekhov letter to his publisher, Suvorin. I think it gives an insight into the life of the lower classes at the end of the nineteenth century and the hard life that they had, the sort of conditions that could well have bred the Whitechapel murderer. While Chekhov's ending is a noble one, we might imagine another outcome where the man who comes out of this background was a man like the Ripper:
- Christopher George10
"What the aristocrat writers get for free from nature, intellectuals of lower birth have to pay for with their youth. Write a story of how a young man, the son of a serf, a former shopboy, choirboy, schoolboy, and student, brought up to respect rank, to kiss priests' hands, and worship the thoughts of others, thankful for every piece of bread, whipped time and again, having to go give lessons without galoshes, brawling, torturing animals, loving to eat at rich relatives' houses, needlessly hypocritical before God and man, merely from a sense of his own insignificance. Write a story about how this young man squeezes the serf out of himself, drop by drop, and how waking up one bright morning, this young man feels that in his veins there no longer flows the blood of a slave, but the blood of a real man."
- Anton Chekhov
Conclusion ¡V if the Ripper were a product of his environment, he would have not hesitated to kill, probably being limited only by time. His other motives for mutilation and leaving of the victims in public could have been as follows:
Mutilation
„h Jack the Mad Man
„h Jack the Jill-Hater
„h Jack the Jolly Man
„h Jack the Human-being Stalker
„h Jack the Anarchist
„h Jack the Blind Man
Public Display
„h Jack the Practical Man
„h Jack the Egotist
„h Jack the Obsessed
„h Jack the Anarchist
„h Jack the Litterbug
„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
Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.
- Proverbs 22:6
And, of course, the reverse of the proverb is also true. For an illustration, we need look no further than the tragic childhood of Henry Lee Lucas:
¡§Henry, his brother, and at times his father, were witness to his mother¡¦s sexual escapades with whatever "customer" was present at the time. At times his mother would insist that Henry and his brother watch her having sex, to the point where she would punish them if they attempted to leave or look away.¡¨19
A similar example of the probable effect of a bad environment in the creation of a serial killer is that of Peter Kurten, who grew up in a one-room apartment where his father would beat and essentially rape Peter's mother in front of their 10+ children.
The environment in which a child is raised is, of course, tremendously important in shaping the child¡¦s future as an adult. Although aberrations do occur, as in the case of Jeffrey Dahmer, most others follow a fairly predictable path in the journey from child to adult. A child raised in a specific environment will, most likely, mirror that environment as an adult. Thus, the child raised in a dysfunctional environment may largely be expected to be dysfunctional himself. The author personally knows a young man, a prison inmate in Texas, who was raised in a family in which incest was commonly practiced at all levels. When he reached adulthood, the end results were all too predictable ¡V he has been incarcerated for sexual assault. The dysfunction can become second nature, regardless of what it is, as witnessed by the recent events at a family-owned crematorium in Georgia. There, the man who was in operation of the facility had, as a child, always been around death and decay. Dead bodies and rotting corpses had apparently been everyday objects in his youth, and, as an adult, he kept hundreds of corpses in various stages of dissolution, even going so far as to take digital photographs of them to store on his computer for later review. Even more unusual was the total lack of any evidence of necrophilia; it was apparently never a factor in his actions. He simply liked having the dead around him, because they had always been around him.
Killers, and serial killers in particular, have often had emotional problems with their parents, especially their mothers, that seem to have caused critical and destructive personality changes later in life:
¡§Men are what their mothers made them.¡¨
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
When a too-young boy is seduced or raped by a woman ¡V and it has happened ¡V or exposed to sexual activities too soon in life, he may grow up hating sex and those women who promote it. Naturally, what women promote sex more than prostitutes?
¡§A prostitute was found murdered. During the investigation the defendant stated that his mother had been a prostitute, and during his childhood he had frequently witnessed her in the company of male partners. Following this, he had developed a deep hatred for women and desired only to inflict pain upon them.¡¨14
Criminal history also indicates that if the mother¡¦s own attitude about sex is abnormal, the chances are that the son¡¦s will be abnormal as well:
¡§Ed Gein had an twisted relationship with his mother in which he viewed her as a angelic saint-like deity/goddess. She would force the view of "sex and women are the devils work" and kept him at home as much as possible. Ed basically committed his ghoulish deeds in order to "deal" with his suppressed sexuality and interest in women and also his "hatred" toward them because of his mother's anti-sexual views.¡¨19
Rumbelow writes of social conditions in London¡¦s East End at the time of the Whitechapel Murders, conditions that the Ripper himself may very well have experienced as a child. The excellent introductory section ¡¥Outcast London¡¦ of Rumbelow¡¦s book paints a stark picture of what life may have been like for our young master Jacky:
¡§Here is a mother who turns her children into the street in the early evening because she lets her room for immoral purposes until long after midnight, when the poor little wretches creep back again if they have not found some miserable shelter elsewhere.¡¨9
Combine crushing poverty, an alcoholic and abusive ¡V or absentee - father, and a prostituting mother, possibly a sadistic one such as Henry Lee Lucas had, and it would have been a sure recipe for creating violent dysfunction and emotional problems, possibly even resulting in a psychopath or sociopath. So likely is this occurrence of events and so attractive is their premise, that many Ripperologists are convinced that it must be so. One chatter visiting The JTR Chatroom during one of the recent structured chat sessions guaranteed everyone present that the Ripper¡¦s mother had been a prostitute ¡V period ¡V in spite of there being absolutely no known evidence of such whatsoever. For him, it simply had to be that way, and we were all wasting our time discussing other possibilities, suspects, and motives.
A bad environment could certainly manifest itself in numerous ways other than discussed thus far. Who knows the ultimate effect that it would have upon a child, other than to be terribly detrimental in some fashion? Following is discussion in this vein:
This <the paragraph following> is from Peter Constantine's translation of The Undiscovered Chekhov, Forty-Three New Stories. It was previously published as part of a Chekhov letter to his publisher, Suvorin. I think it gives an insight into the life of the lower classes at the end of the nineteenth century and the hard life that they had, the sort of conditions that could well have bred the Whitechapel murderer. While Chekhov's ending is a noble one, we might imagine another outcome where the man who comes out of this background was a man like the Ripper:
- Christopher George10
"What the aristocrat writers get for free from nature, intellectuals of lower birth have to pay for with their youth. Write a story of how a young man, the son of a serf, a former shopboy, choirboy, schoolboy, and student, brought up to respect rank, to kiss priests' hands, and worship the thoughts of others, thankful for every piece of bread, whipped time and again, having to go give lessons without galoshes, brawling, torturing animals, loving to eat at rich relatives' houses, needlessly hypocritical before God and man, merely from a sense of his own insignificance. Write a story about how this young man squeezes the serf out of himself, drop by drop, and how waking up one bright morning, this young man feels that in his veins there no longer flows the blood of a slave, but the blood of a real man."
- Anton Chekhov
Conclusion ¡V if the Ripper were a product of his environment, he would have not hesitated to kill, probably being limited only by time. His other motives for mutilation and leaving of the victims in public could have been as follows:
Mutilation
„h Jack the Mad Man
„h Jack the Jill-Hater
„h Jack the Jolly Man
„h Jack the Human-being Stalker
„h Jack the Anarchist
„h Jack the Blind Man
Public Display
„h Jack the Practical Man
„h Jack the Egotist
„h Jack the Obsessed
„h Jack the Anarchist
„h Jack the Litterbug
„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
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