Proof of Innocence?

[Edward Stow]

Arguably it would depend on how fantastic and fabulous this hypothetical woman was.
Or less sympathetically, how desperate the hypothetical man was.

But Dr Zhivago-esque love stories are not that uncommon, so there is no real comparison between the Browns and a serial killer. Or is there?

The notion that the East End was a particularly favourable spot in which to locate a vulnerable woman to murder is very overplayed. It is readibg history backwards. The South Bank - right by Waterloo - would have been just as good or even better for that purpose. Was Druitt at all familiar with the East End?

[Caroline Brown]

Were 'experts' publicly being quoted as saying that the culprit's mind had given way after the murder of Mary Kelly and before Druitt's death?
This isn't a leading question, I actually don't know.

I don't know either, Ed, which is why I qualified that specific query with the word 'if'. The newspapers certainly didn't hold back on giving various people's opinions on the killer and his mental state, and we just don't know how those opinions would have been received by him. Did he even understand his own mind, and his reasons for doing what he did? We don't know why - or when - he stopped killing, so was he totally in control of his own mind and body until something happened to make him stop? We can only speculate.

Love,

Caz
X

[Caroline Brown]

Arguably it would depend on how fantastic and fabulous this hypothetical woman was.
Or less sympathetically, how desperate the hypothetical man was.

But Dr Zhivago-esque love stories are not that uncommon, so there is no real comparison between the Browns and a serial killer. Or is there?

The notion that the East End was a particularly favourable spot in which to locate a vulnerable woman to murder is very overplayed. It is readibg history backwards. The South Bank - right by Waterloo - would have been just as good or even better for that purpose. Was Druitt at all familiar with the East End?

If Druitt was the ripper, then the answer to your last question is yes, he would have made himself as familiar with the East End as he needed to be - which means not that familiar, if he was picked up on a main thoroughfare by a victim and only had to retrace his steps after killing her.

I don't think it can be that uncommon for an active serial killer to have a killing instinct every bit as strong as an ordinary person's instinct to seek out a life partner.

Surprised you don't feel the same way, considering your belief in the strength of Lechmere's baser instincts. Do you think he purposefully went to live and work where he did, to give himself an endless supply of victims? Or was he just fortunate to find himself among so many unfortunates? If he had lived in a tiny village instead, would he have had no taste for it, or would the female villagers have been picked off one after another, like six episodes of Midsomer Murders rolled into one?

Love,

Caz
X

[Michael Banks]

Hi Michael -- I did a bit of poking around, and Christer's 6% suicide rate is apparently based on a study by David Lester and John White (the precise number was 6.2%).

But I noticed something interesting in their abstract:


"In a sample of 483 serial killers, 6.2% were documented to have committed suicide. Those who committed suicide were found to come from more dysfunctional homes characterized by more psychiatric disturbance in the parents. [note: Druitt's mother was institutionalized for insanity]. The sexual acts involved in the murders by the suicides seemed to be more deviant in some aspects, such as committing more bizarre sexual acts or more often taping the murder."

So in other words, the more freakishly sexual the murders were, the more likely the murderer was to commit suicide, which changes things considerably. Lack of evidence of direct sexual interference aside, one might argue that the Ripper murders were "off the charts" when it came to sexual deviancy, so maybe Macnaghten was not so off-the-mark to think the murderer may have tossed himself in the Thames shortly after the perversions of Miller's Court.

A few more relevant points:

1. 6.2% is not a small number. It is a BIG number. I just checked -- the suicide rate in Sweden hovers at 0.12%, while the rate in my own deeply dysfunctional country is a bit higher at around 0.14% and climbing. Thus, roughly speaking, "serialists" are nearly FIFTY TIMES more likely to commit suicide than the general population, which is significant and cannot be seen as a white flag.

2. Lester and White don't tell us how many others TRIED to commit suicide, but failed. This cuts both ways. If one is incarcerated, the rate would presumably go up due to despair, but might also be lower than expected because inmates share cells with other inmates and there is often a 'suicide' watch or at least frequent walkthroughs as well as access to medical treatment.

3. Studies have linked clinical depression with violent behavior. I don’t see any reason to think a narcissist couldn’t also be suicidal—I think that assumption is too simplistic; the behavior is widely seen as overcompensation for low self-esteem. Indeed, I found the following abstract: "The relationship of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) to suicidal behavior is understudied. The modest body of existing research suggests that NPD is protective against non-fatal suicide attempts, but is associated with high lethality attempts." In other words, when they attempt suicide, they succeed!

4. Here is a biggy. Lester and White’s statistic of 6.2% is based on SOLVED CASES. This is unavoidable because they can only study cases where the murderer was captured or at least identified. But that fact alone may skew the results and create a bias and an untrustworthy number. What about the unsolved cases? Theoretically, a large swath of the unsolved murders may have involved suicides who were never captured because they had killed themselves and thus stayed below the radar—and this could especially be true because of the link between clinical depression and violence. Indeed, in recent memory alone, advances in DNA have solved three cases of “serial” homicide, having successfully traced the murders back to someone who had committed suicide:


In 2021 in France, a policeman committed suicide when the net began to close --advances in DNA testing showed that years earlier he had murdered several young girls.

This year, using advances in DNA testing, three murders in Oregon dating back to the 1980s were traced to a man who had committed suicide in jail in 1988.

There was a similar case recently reported in Colorado. "Suspect Joe Michael Ervin killed himself in 1981 after being arrested in the shooting death of Aurora police officer." DNA tests have since linked Ervin to the previously unsolved murders of four women.


Thus, Christer might well be jumping the gun. As DNA testing techniques get better, Lester and White's estimate of 6.2% might turn out to be far too low.

Excellent stuff Roger.

Who was it that said that there are three types of lies….lies, damned lies and statistics? Thanks for taking this closer look.

[Steve Blomer]

A review of Druitt's cricketing - scores, teams and teammates will provide a more accurate picture.
When matches started...
As more newspapers are included online no doubt more information will come to light.
And of course all train timetables.

The problem will be club matches, start times for leagues and first class are I suggest easier to find and to be more consistent

[Christer Holmgren]

I'm not "juggling". I'm explaining the statistical fallacy you've fallen into.

You're trying to tell us Druitt is a bad suspect because he committed suicide, on the basis that only a minority of serial killers commit suicide. That is, you're trying to tell us that the probability that he was a serial killer is lower, given that he committed suicide, than it would have been if he hadn't committed suicide. But in fact, purely as a simple piece of arithmetic, the opposite is true.

Consider a simple analogy. In the UK at the moment, the highest rate of COVID-19 infections is among young children under 6. That means that the probability that someone is infected is higher, given that they are under 6, than it would have been if they had been over 6. (Just the same as if you replace "infected" with "serial killer" and "are under 6" with "committed suicide".)

In that analogy, your argument would be that of all the people infected, only a minority are under 6. You would argue on that basis, that if someone were under 6 they would be less likely to be infected. But in fact the opposite is true!

Please just have a think about it before (or preferably rather than) responding.

I have fallen into no statistical fallacy at all, Chris. And I have thought a whole deal about this, so I will tell you exactly why.

You say that the fact that Druitt committed suicide makes him a likelier suspect than what the case would have been if he did not commit suicide. And that is completely true - based on the information you use. And that information says that people in general are less likely to commit suicide than serial killers.

So yes, going on that information only, you are correct.

Furthermore, you say that the information that serial killers are very unlikely to commit suicide is "irrelevant". And once again, you are spot on. It IS irrlevant - to the fact that serial killers are more likely to kill themselves than other people.

So far so good. But the problem is that you are trying to avoid VERY relevant information. And so what we will do is to perform a little statistical magic to turn your verdict around.

In 2020, 45 799 people killed themselves in the US. If we are very generous, let´s say that five sexual serial killers did away with themselves in the US that same year. That would mean that the chance that any given suicide victim was a serial killer would amount to 0.0001 per cent. Meaning that although it would still apply that serial killers are more likely than other people to kill themselves, the logical guess when a dead body is found, is NOT that it was a serial killer since more serial killers are likely to kill themselves than ordinary people.

You see, your conclusion is interesting only in isolation, because in isolation, it allows us to look away from the underlying facts.

If 2 per cent of all Norwegian ships sink within ten years of their production, whereas 1 per cent only of Danish ships do, then it means that any randomly chosen sinking ship is more likely to be Norwegian than Danish.

What it does NOT mean is that Norwegian ships are more likely to sink within ten years of their production than not.

Use one parameter only and you will never get the full picture.

Yes, Druitt as a suicide victim is statistically more likely to be a sexual serial killer than those representing the general public because they kill themselves less frequently than sexual serial killers do.

But no, if Druitt actually was a sexual serial killer, he was never going to be likely to kill himself in the first place.

Use one parameter only and you will never get the full picture.

If, that is, you actually WANT the full picture?

So what should an investigator who finds a dead body do? How should he reason? Should he reason that there is a good chance that the dead person was a serial killer since they are more prone to suicide than other people? Or should he reason that the dead body is infinitely more likely NOT to be a serial killer, since they are not only extremly rare per se, but also completely unlikely to commit suicide?

Once we look at it from that angle, it should be very clear how much your statistics have going for them. The one and only really relevant factor is how likely an uncaught sexual serial killer is to kill himself, not the suicide ratio between "normal" people and serial killers.

Plus, of course, your statistics are almost exclusively grounded in serial killer suicides where the killer has been imprisoned or sentenced to death. One hundred per cent of the ones in the Wikipedia list who had committed suicide were killers who had been jailed, with the exception of one South Korean killer, who threw himself under a bus during a police hunt.

Any relevant basis for a comparison with Druitt should be grounded on how many sexual serial killers kill themselves although the police are NOT onto them. And that number will be very close to zero if you ask me.

Then again, you don´t ask me. I do not go along with your "Statistics Light" take on things, and so you prefer to advice me not to answer at all.

Sorry to disappoint you in that respect.

If Montague Druitt was a sexual serial killer, then he would have been statistically extremely unlikely to kill himself. He may (or may not) have been more so inclined than ordinary people (which is the one and only part of a point you may have), but it would nevertheless be totally unexpected if he did. Generously, he would be a one in twenty chance for suicide, but if we rule out all the murders commited by jailed serial killers, the number will approach zero.

[Chris Phillips]

I have fallen into no statistical fallacy at all, Chris. And I have thought a whole deal about this, so I will tell you exactly why.

You say that the fact that Druitt committed suicide makes him a likelier suspect than what the case would have been if he did not commit suicide. And that is completely true ...

Yes. That is what I am saying, and that is all I am saying. So as you agree that it is correct, thankfully there is no need to discuss this further,

Of course I am not saying, as you seem to suggest, that because Druitt committed suicide he was more likely than not to be a serial killer. That would be absurd, and I really can't imagine how anyone could think I was saying that.

[Michael Banks]

Yes, if only five people out of 100 have hazel eyes and you predicged that the next man coming around the corner would have hazel eyes, and he did, then it would have been remarkable. That is the very nature of the statistics involved. You would predict an outcome that only had a five per cent chance of being correct - and get the result you predicted. It would be in conflict with the statistical facts involved.

I totally disagree. Of course it wouldn’t be remarkable. It wouldn’t raise an eyebrow as far as I’m concerned Fish. No more remarkable than the odds of a serial killer murdering a woman 15 minutes or so before he’s due at work because so far I’ve seen no other example of this. So perhaps we have to conclude that Lechmere was the first serial killer in history to do so?

However, I would of course not accuse you of "setting it up". Why would I? Sooner or later, that kind of prediction must come true - one time out of twenty, to be statistically exact.

It is not about me calling you names for clinging to your belief that Druitt may have been the Ripper. It is about how the known statistical facts are against the proposition.

Druitt might or might not have been the ripper. This is a fact.

There are other matters involved in this exercise that we should not forget about. For example, eye colour is not divided into two possible fields only, there are hazel eyes, dark brown eyes, light blue eyes, green eyes etcetera. And eye colour is not linked to processes of the mind. Whether or nbot you are going to kill yourself have two possible outcomes only, you do or you don´t. And it is linked only to mind processes. So your example is not equivalent to the matter at hand other than to a degree, and only purely statistically.

A psychopathic narcissist serial killer is a person who considers himself way above those he co-exists with. He is a person who is consistently legally aware that what he does is not condoned by society, so in that respect, he would have had reason to feel ashamed about it. But that would only work if he accepted and lived by the societal norms. He does, however, not do so. And he is not ashamed for not doing it. He enjoys what he is doing, and far from evoking senses of shame, his deeds instead fires a hunger for doing it again and again.

We should not be surprised that such a person is totally unlikely to kill himself out of shame. The victorians, however, were. As I wrote before, it seems they reasoned that the worse the crime, the likelier it would be that the perpetrator killed himself. And MacNaghten reasoned along the same lines - the brain of the killer would not have been able to cope with what the killer did in Millers Court, and so it gave way and he did away with himself. Very, very clearly, we can see that this is the exact opposite of how psychopathic and narcissistic serial killers function.

Once we discard MacNaghtens romantic misconceptions about how sexual serial killers function, we can see how the very foundation of the accusations against Druitt cave in. And the two points of accusation against him (there are only two) are linked to each other. Accusation number one is that Druitt gave away his guilt by killing himself after the Millers court murder. That is an accusation that is not supported by the known facts (again Rader, again Ridgway, again Bundy, again Cottingham, again De Angelo).
The second point of accusation is that Druitts own relatives may have thought that he was the killer, as per MacNaghten. However, since people of the victorian era shared MacNaghtens misconception that horrific crimes will burn out the brain of their instigators who then go on to kill themselves, why would it be strange if some relative of Druitt made the same error as Mac did?

This cannot be stated as the basis of MacNaghten’s suspicion against Druitt. We don’t know what the information was or how valid it was.

Again, it has nothing to do with any belief of mine that you are "setting things up". It is a sheer and simple matter of statistics and known facts. And statistics and known facts are in conflict with the notion that Montague Druitt would have been the Ripper. That´s not to say that it is physically impossible. But it IS to say that Druitt is a very unlikely Ripper. And an even unlikelier one after the latest cricket news. If you excuse the pun, it´s tempting to call the suggestion bat shit crazy.

Roger’s post reveals more about those statistics.

Fish, I realise that they don’t really play cricket in Sweden, but there’s no point in me or anyone pointing out the facts again here. This information doesn’t preclude, hamper or hinder him getting to London with ample time to have killed Nichols and then with more than ample time to return the day before the match. Again, I’m in no way stating or suggesting that Druitt was the killer. He might not have been. Proof that eliminates him might be out there and this applies to every suspect of course.

I don´t think that I can be much clearer than this, and I don´t look forward to explaining it again, so I think I will draw the line there. Thanks for the exchange.

I’m not interested in your usual tactic of saying “look I’ve explained the facts and I’m not prepared to waste anymore time on you” tactic Christer because I’ve experienced your condescension many times. I disagree with you. I read Roger’s reasoned, unbiased post. Good enough for me.

We all have our opinions and others will differ with mine of course but Joanna’s excellent find hasn’t changed my opinion on the possibility that Druitt might have been guilty one iota. If disproving evidence surfaced I’d say fine, that’s one suspect to scratch from the list. I wouldn’t be saddened or disappointed and I certainly wouldn’t be angry. I have no investment in defending Druitt at any cost. I get labelled a Druittist which doesn’t bother me but all that I’ve ever said is that a) I find him an interesting suspect that’s often too easily dismissed imo, and b) that I favour him of the named suspects, but of the named suspects I have little time for any others apart from Kosminski and Bury.

[Michael Banks]

Hi Michael,

I wonder how much difference the era JtR was living in would have made to how he viewed his own crimes and guilt, compared with modern serial killers. I don't believe his psychopathy would necessarily have been different from later versions of himself, but his perceptions of self could have been influenced by what the people around him at the time thought about the 'monster within'. For instance, if he read that 'experts' were saying his mind would surely give way after Miller's Court, would he have laughed it off, knowing how little understanding they had of men like him, or might he actually have believed it and been terrified of what lay ahead for him? If a doctor tells someone they have a serious condition which can only get worse, will that person know any different?

While the vast majority of known serial killers do not kill themselves unless cornered, and few are described these days as hopelessly insane, they are products of their time, and will have a different understanding of how others see them. So I wouldn't be surprised if JtR fell victim in some way to his own publicity and believed the picture portrayed.

Love,

Caz
X

Hi Caz,

Thats a good point. I always hear alarm bells when claims are made like “well this man was x so he should have done y.” Statistics have their uses of course but we all know how complex an individual mind is and especially one as disturbed as our killer so I think we should be wary of pigeonholing. We have information from interviews with serial murderers of course but how many refused to be interviewed? How can we be certain that they were always truthful when interviewed? We can come up with any number of ‘what if’s’ of course but ‘what if’ he was the kind of killer who believed that prostitutes were ‘expendable’ or that he’d been doing society a favour and what if he began to feel that he was less and less able to control himself and he feared that he might end up killing a woman that he saw as an ‘innocent’ victim (as The Yorkshire Ripper detectives labelled the victims that weren’t prostitutes.) Who knows what strange thoughts might pass through or entrench themselves in any killers mind?

[Michael Banks]

The problem will be club matches, start times for leagues and first class are I suggest easier to find and to be more consistent

Hello Steve,

Good point. Like you I’ve played a lot of cricket in my younger days and most of the games started at 11.00 but I’ve played many a game that began at 10am. Of course these guys wouldn’t have had to think about allowing for spectator attendance. The top and bottom is that we just don’t know the start time but if I had to give a reasonable average estimate I’d go for around 11.00. Even England could beat those two teams.

[Edward Stow]

There are lines of enquiry that can be pursued about the start time but suffice it to say - firstly the players had to get there, which I think precludes too early a start - secondly most games in that era were low scoring in comparison to today which certainly doesn't mean that the match would have been over in anything like the same time that a modern low scoring game would be. The pitches were slower.

[Steve Blomer]

There are lines of enquiry that can be pursued about the start time but suffice it to say - firstly the players had to get there, which I think precludes too early a start - secondly most games in that era were low scoring in comparison to today which certainly doesn't mean that the match would have been over in anything like the same time that a modern low scoring game would be. The pitches were slower.

Not sure the pitches were slower.
They were certainly more sporting as they say, inconsistent bounce and plenty of sideways movement.
Probably equal to many council run pitches now. Probably not as good as the majority of private club pitches today.

Fielding was also very different, diving to stop a four, being almost unknown.
Different game then Ed, so not really possible to compare.
The most accurate method would probably be based on number of overs bowled.
Over on FB, John Grieves produced some club history from Leicestershire showing club games in that area were often 2.30-7.30, much like present Sunday afternoon. Social cricket, as opposed to league.

[Chris Phillips]

Over on FB, John Grieves produced some club history from Leicestershire showing club games in that area were often 2.30-7.30, much like present Sunday afternoon. Social cricket, as opposed to league.

I can't help feeling that an ounce of such data would be worth a ton of the conjecture that seems to be predominating on the discussion boards,

I wonder if John would be willing to post it here, or to give permission for it to be reposted here.

[Edward Stow]

What is needed is information from Dorset which may be available.

[Jay Hartley]

Ignore, just realised this posted earlier in the thread.