Me Tarzan You Jane

I've been wandering about the library and the Internet for information on ridiculous suspects; however the latter has proven to be more successful on this.
Thanks Sam for the casebook link, it helped me finding useful stuff on my first suspect Jill the Ripper( also known as Jane the Ripper), the common name given to the female version of Jack.
The notion of a female ripper was first put forward in a letter by Reverend Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne in a letter to the Times. Osborne suggests that the gruesome murders are the result of the turbulent street life of that time and area.

In Odell’s “Ripperology…” is a collage of theories taken form different authors, one he quotes is Steward who suggests that the ripper must have been a midwife. I must note that he is mentioned by a lot of ripperologists as “a personae non grata among ripperologists”. He set up a few criteria and in his research a midwife was the only one who could have been seen near the victims, was known by people in the neighbourhood, and could have wandered the streets covered in blood without being suspicious.
He has an odd attitude towards the cutting up and mutilations of the victims; this wasn’t done by a surgeon or doctor, but just a random slaughter.
A midwife would also have known a sufficient amount of knowledge about the uterus and surrounding organs.

There is however a case for a midwife ripper considering Mary Kelly’s murder. It has been said that she was pregnant at the time of the murders, although later proven wrong. Therefore needing the aid of a midwife, she undressed and neatly folded her clothes away. The midwife slaughtered her and burnt her own bloody clothes, stealing MK’s outfit and sneaked out.
Of course a midwife doing illegal abortions must know a lot of prostitutes in the area; it makes her suspicious enough to be taken in consideration as a real suspect.

Some persons are being named, one of which was Mary Pearcey; an extremely strong women capable of committing violent crimes. She was hanged in 1890.

In another book John Eddleston suggests that Olga Tchkerhoff was Jill. She emigrated from Russia with her parents and sister. The latter went into prostitution and later died after an abortion, apparently Mary Kelly lured her into it so Olga took revenge.

After some research I concluded that an Australian forensic detective recovered some DNA sample at the bottom of the stamp of one if ‘his’ letters. Despite that it’s proven that the letters were a media hoax done by a newspaper journalist and never been regarded as conclusive evidence, the DNA sample has been labelled as useless. They were too small, too old and poorly preserved.

If you might accidentally be interested in more on Jill, here’s the online version of the book I have used. http://books.google.com/books?id=8g6vSscwjT8C&pg=PA74&dq=jill+the+ripper&hl=nl#v=onepage&q=jill%20the%20ripper&f=false from p.73 onwards.

...and next week.

I've booked a room in the library, Thursday 3rd December for 11am till 1pm, MD127. It's a group room so we will have a computer to watch the PowerPoint on. We agreed to get our individual parts done and e-mailed to Otti by then so that we can concentrate on the presentation and running time. Is this still ok with everyone?

Yesterday...

We were discussing in class yesterday, possible ways of getting some audience participation into the presentation. The ideas we came up with were to decide which of our three suspects we thought were the best, then have the audience vote for which of those four they thought Jack the Ripper was. Mark seemed a little worried that this would be looking more at who the Ripper was rather than why we're so obsessed with him. The other idea weas to have the audience vote on who the Ripper is based on a photo of our favourite suspects. That way we're looking at people stereotyping and judging others on appearance rather than trying to solve the crimes? We could even conclude with who and audience in 1888 may have voted for too?

Ripper Walk Transcript continued... (with added bits)

Another Ripper suspect who also fits both profiles is Francis Tumblety. Ireland was where Tumblety was born and raised before he moved to the East End in 1888, which incidentally was just before (and spanned the entire duration of) the ripper murders.
He was known for hating women, especially prostitutes. Tumblety liked to give small lecture tours where he was also known for saying that the only way to deal with the prostitution was to kill the prostitutes. However, impartial to his strong dislike of women, he had a tendency to carry around female sex organs with him in little jars.

In a testimony given by Colonel Dunham, he stated that he had been invited to Tumblety’s house one night for dinner and continued by voicing the suspicious air unintentionally conjured by their host and the strange tendencies he seemed to house. He proclaimed;

"Someone asked why he had not invited some women to his dinner. His face instantly became as black as a thunder-cloud. He had a pack of cards in his hand, but he laid them down and said, almost savagely, 'No, Colonel, I don’t know any such cattle, and if I did I would, as your friend, sooner give you a dose of quick poison than take you into such danger.' He then broke into a homily on the sin and folly of dissipation, fiercely denounced all women and especially fallen women.

He then invited us into his office where he illustrated his lecture so to speak. One side of this room was entirely occupied with cases, outwardly resembling wardrobes. When the doors were opened quite a museum was revealed -- tiers of shelves with glass jars and cases, some round and others square, filled with all sorts of anatomical specimens. The ‘doctor’ placed on a table a dozen or more jars containing, as he said, the matrices (uteri) of every class of women. Nearly a half of one of these cases was occupied exclusively with these specimens.

Not long after this the ‘doctor’ was in my room when my Lieutenant-Colonel came in and commenced expatiating on the charms of a certain woman. In a moment, almost, the doctor was lecturing him and denouncing women. When he was asked why he hated women, he said that when quite a young man he fell desperately in love with a pretty girl, rather his senior, who promised to reciprocate his affection. After a brief courtship he married her. The honeymoon was not over when he noticed a disposition on the part of his wife to flirt with other men. He remonstrated, she kissed him, called him a dear jealous fool -- and he believed her. Happening one day to pass in a cab through the worst part of the town he saw his wife and a man enter a gloomy-looking house. Then he learned that before her marriage his wife had been an inmate of that and many similar houses. Then he gave up all womankind." Excerpt taken from http://www.casebook.org/suspects/tumblety.html

Tumblety was brought in for questioning on Mary Kelly but somehow escaped and fled to France. The police followed him to France but by the time they found out where he was living in Bordeaux, he had gone to upstate New York. He was living in Rochester for nearly six months before he disappeared again. During he’s brief stay in New York, 3 prostitutes were murdered with knives. They were murdered in not exactly the same fashion but in a similar enough way to link them to the previous London murders.Tumblety disappeared for almost 19 years before reappearing in the southern state of Macuri as a very wealthy man. People often speculate what they believe he was up to in all his years of public absence, but no one really knows for sure.

Transcripts and Bits

I've finished the rest of the Ripper Walk transcript about the popular suspects. So here it is.
The excerpts have been added from Casebook.

Casebook's extremley handy for general info and source info concerning Ripper suspects. Sooo if you haven't been on there then deffinatly check it out at www.casebook.org

I've decided to breifly mention the popular suspects with reference to the police profiles in the presentation intro. But i don't think i'll have enough time to go into them in futher detail, so if anybody else is thinking of disscussing any of the suspect i've mentioned, just let me know so we can split it evenly to make sure we don't say the same thing twice and conflicting info.

Also, does anyone know what the time slot is for the presentation? I've looked on Wolf but i can't seem to find our group anywhere!!

Here's the rest of the transcript anyway, enjoy! X

Ripper Walk Transcripts Continued...

Aaron Kosminski was described by the police as a low class, Polish Jew. He was thought to have come over to England to work as a butcher, however Kosminski secretly fancied himself a surgeon and would frequently perform back alley abortions. Eventually, after a few botched operations, people began to realise that he didn’t really know what he was doing and as word got about, women stopped going to see him. At first, Aaron started to become violent and then soon after, his violence grew towards women leading the police to lock him up in a mental institution. He later escaped in august 1888 and was later caught in November 1888 just after Mary Kelly’s death and locked up again where he died 2 years later.His escape only lasted from August to November, but these three months coincided with the exact duration of the ripper murders, which would explain the reason for all the murders occurring in the given space of time and also why they suddenly stopped after Mary Kelly.
Kosminski is still police favourite even today because he fits the physiological profile the best; in being a butcher posing as a surgeon he fits the Alter-Ego description. He also suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and knew three out of five of the victims. He also had experience with using knives through his days working as a London butcher and a general knowledge of the female anatomy from posing as a back alley abortion surgeon.However, Kosminski does not fit the physical profiling according to the general consensus of witness accounts describing the man seen hanging around on the nights of the murders. Physical Profile.

· Dark hair
· Sallow skin
· Tall
· Middle to upper class Manner and style of dress
· Large moustache

If the Physical profiling is correct, then it is perhaps more fitting to look at suspect Montague Druitt. Montague Druitt had a respectable job working as a school teacher at an acclaimed and expensive boy’s school in London. He was one of the police’s favourite suspects in 1888 and only caused suspicion to arise in the wake of coincidental suicide just after Mary Kelly’s death. After the police pulled Druitt’s body from the Thames, Detectives began to investigate his lodgings and found heavily bloodstained clothes. They also found letters written by Druitt stating that he was ‘going the same way as mother...’ Montague had a history of mental illness running in his family and mother happened was housed in a mental asylum at the time. When Druitt first moved to the east end he at first began to live over his cousin’s (Dr Lionel Druitt’s) surgery.

Ripper Transcripts!

Hi Everyone,

I've managed to type up a bit of the transcript from the London Ripper Walk about some of the main suspects, so have a read and see what you think!

If you see anything useful that you could include in your part of the presentation, feel free to use it. I can't use it in mine unfortunately due to lack of time with my intro and conclusion, but feel free to pluck bits.

The walk was really intriguing, it’s a shame I can't upload the recordings I took but if anyone knows how, then please let me know. Thanks, & Enjoy!
Sam. X

MEETING

Hiiiidihow Yall!

enough of that,

I booked a room for us on Monday November 23rd from 3-5 in MD 129.

It would be great if you could show up at 3 otherwise 4 is fine :)

By the way I got some nice suspect info from: jack the ripper; a reference guide and 'uncovering jack the ripper'.

If anybody fancies to find some more, there are quite some good book on it in the forst floor of the library at 364.152 3 ... might you feel obliged to find ou some more.

laters,
Pieter

Topic: Suspects over the ages

We have a topic! Suspects over the Ages! Now, what are we going to do. Gather information for next week?

Topics

Hey everybody! This is where we can discuss our presentation!

First, which topic!?? Take a look at the topics on wolf and add your preferences on this blog!