Serial Killers on Sprees

[Anna Morris]

After reading Tim Mosley and Scott Nelson's article in Ripperologist 159 about JtR vanishing into history, I have an observation.

I lead a rather peculiar life and have been caring for a sick person for quite some time. My patient will only watch the true crime channel on TV and it is on all day. My patient doesn't really follow the stories but there is a fascination with the channel. So a lot of true crime stories run past my brain which is an explanation of why I cannot name names with the following observation.

We think that serial killers cannot or will not stop yet there seems to me to be another kind of SK that kills four or five in best SK fashion and then stops altogether. These guys are getting caught with cold case work and DNA.

I am thinking of three cases. A man in Texas killed young women who looked like his young teen daughters. He was also having sex with his daughters. A man in Washington state did similar. An African American man, maybe in California, had killed women who looked like his wife,

In all the cases the killings happened when the killer was under stress. None of these men were nice but the killing aspect seemed limited to one spree which stopped. Years passed before DNA and cold case squads caught up.

If we think of JtR as having five victims in a short amount of time it could fit this sort of pattern.

I can try to dig up names for the cases mentioned.

[Howard Brown]

Anna:

Sorry for the slow reply..... the possibility that The Ripper had a matricidial impulse has been something I've thought about for a long time.

The ages and/or (assumed on my part ) matronly appearance of the women combined with what the murder victims were engaged in could have been the catalyst to his outrages.

[Tania Edwards]

Hi Anna


This is a very interesting point you raise. What kind of stress triggered these men to commit these crimes? Like Howard, the matricide aspect interests me. Could Jack's mother have been a prostitute, someone that had many men in her life. Was she cruel and/or domineering? Could Jack have had a wife like this? Killing the older C5 victims would fit into the mother hating pattern. What would Jack's trigger have been? I guess anything is possible.


t

[Robert Linford]

Re the mother syndrome :


Would it depend on the age of the murderer, i.e. would a man aged 20 want to kill, say, women aged c40, whereas a man aged 40 would want to kill women aged c60? Or would a man aged 40 whose mother died when he was 20, want to kill women aged c40?


Difficult to get inside the heads of these nutters.

[Anna Morris]

The three cases I alluded to in the beginning seemed to revolve around sight, the general appearance of the victims, and periods of stress at home. In two cases fathers killed women that looked like their teen daughters and in one case a husband killed women that looked like his wife.

I was able to back track one story and get a name. Anthony Shore, recently executed in Texas, killed four women who resembled like his daughters. This spree lasted about four years and seems to have ended in 1998. He had legal troubles for molesting his daughters in 2000 but he was tied to the murders in 2004 because of DNA required from the molestation case. He was a family man, so to speak, prior to the first murder and seems not to have killed after 1998.

I am leery of relying on TV shows for information since they compress so much into 48 minutes and so leave a lot out. The TV version implies a lot of years elapsed between Shore's last known murder and his being caught. It was only a few years and for at least part of the time he knew the law was after him for molesting his daughters.

Still, there seems to be the pattern I suggest. As a single "father"--having sex with his daughters--when stress got too much, instead of getting drunk or taking up drugs, he started picking up and killing young women who looked like his daughters.

Whether the subject is mothers, daughters or wives, maybe this general thought points to why serial killers usually kill within their own race. The victims must be surrogates for people in the killer's immediate life. It is said SKs objectify their victims, that victims are like trash to be used and discarded. If so, why not cross racial boundaries if a killer believes another race is inferior and worthless?

About JtR and mothers, how about a wife? William Bury could be a for instance. His wife inherited the money and she doled it out. She was in her early thirties and had earned her living as a prostitute. Surely she did not look particularly young. He tried to cut her throat early in the marriage when she refused him more money for the night's carousing. Beyond Bury, what about men whose wives had the money one way or another? Inherited, earned more, had wealthier fathers, etc.? It is not a huge leap for a dirty minded misogynist to make money = prostitution in one form or another. If a woman only = her reproductive parts, then any success she has equals those same parts.

[Cris Malone]

If we only consider the cannonical five (or six) then the 1888 murders could certainly look like a spree killing. As mentioned before, Abberline believed this to be the case.

I don't know because I rarely study many murders beyond these, but it seems spree killers murder for the sake of killing. That's the end game. This series seems different because of postmortem mutilations.

Once again, hard to categorize. To me, the Whitechapel murders appear to be in their own unique class.

[Anna Morris]

If we only consider the cannonical five (or six) then the 1888 murders could certainly look like a spree killing. As mentioned before, Abberline believed this to be the case.

I don't know because I rarely study many murders beyond these, but it seems spree killers murder for the sake of killing. That's the end game. This series seems different because of postmortem mutilations.

Once again, hard to categorize. To me, the Whitechapel murders appear to be in their own unique class.

Use of the word spree may have been a poor choice on my part. I mean a SK killing one after another, using his chosen methods, but in a relatively short period of time, during a time of crisis or stress in his life. No killing, maybe no attempted murders or similar violent acts prior to the "spree" and a return to "normal" life afterward. In the three cases that started me thinking this way, it was implied the SK wanted to kill daughters or wife but he did not for whatever reason, so surrogates were killed during a time when the SKs would have preferred to kill family members.

[Anna Morris]

Replying to my reply below, W. H. Bury wasn't getting all the money he wanted from his wife and that was cramping his style. He couldn't gamble as much or drink as much as he wanted. He tried to cut her throat once when she withheld money. By October he had beaten her so bad that her sister became involved and the sister was watching Bury like a hawk. It would have been simple if he could have killed his wife soon after marrying her and inherited her inheritance. Maybe he was thoroughly tired of the situation by August but if he killed his wife he would certainly be suspected. When he was able to get away with his wife, in an area his alcohol soaked mind suggested they would be unknown and a perfect crime could be committed, he killed HER.

It is not my purpose to push Bury as JtR in this thread but his situation readily illustrates what I think the modern cases mean.

[Anna Morris]

My basic premise here was wrong because the TV shows gave the idea that some killers killed during times of stress, then quit and were eventually caught due to modern forensics. At least two of my original examples were being investigated within a year or two of last known murders so it can hardly be suggested they had stopped killing.

Today How started a thread about serial killers who did stop and I thought again about this thread because that was kind of my original idea except the source material is faulty.

However I think there is another valid point here that at least some serial killing episodes may be binge or spree activities similar to the way some people might go on a drinking or drugging binge. I have a feeling this may especially apply to whoever was JtR.

It is hard to get accurate information even from serial killers who get caught. Robert Lee Yates was one of the three I suggested in post 1. He killed throughout the state of Washington, U.S.A. but committed the bulk of his crimes in Spokane, WA. (I see he started in 1975 in Walla Walla, WA at a time when I lived within a fee miles of there. Considering I have seldom lived in big cities, I sure have managed to be close to some famous creeps over the years.)

I don't know how many more records we can find like this for other serial killers. Yates seems to have accurately admitted his crimes. He was newly married in 1975. His marriage may have been breaking up in 1988. In the 1990's, at least according to the TV shows, he was under immense stress while raising his teenage daughters. It looks like he may only have "quit" when he was under investigation in the late 90's. Going back to the beginning, there were a number of years between the first killing episodes.