Dark Dreams: Sexual Violence, Homicide And The Criminal Mind

by Hazelwood, Roy

  Finally, it was my belief that his own residence would be modest and poorly maintained, much like his vehicle. It might be an apartment, small rental house, or even a trailer.

  A few months later the police notified me that the rapist had been captured in an adjoining state, where he had moved shortly after the attack against Ms. Gilbert. Predictably, he had continued committing sexual assaults. The routine work of establishing where the rapist had previously lived led investigators to the university town and its string of rapes. The DNA evidence solved the cases I’d been retained to analyze.

  My inferential portrait of the rapist was accurate except for one detail: he lived in a nice house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood. When an officer told me this, I was amazed. The policeman let me stew for a moment and then said, “Oh, by the way, his father bought the place for him.”

  Although it was DNA that finally tripped up this offender, Mark Burget was extremely satisfied with my profile and the diligent work of the police department. In an evening that I will never forget, he treated the investigators and myself to a wonderful steak dinner.

  At the conclusion of the evening, as we toasted all around, he said, “You know, guys, my daughter is still my hero.”

  10

  Jack the Ripper

  Profiling was developed to address here-and-now investigative issues. Yet the process has intriguing historical potential as well. As long as we can reliably identify an offender’s behavior and gather sufficient information about the victim, we can profile any criminal, no matter when or where the crimes were committed.

  In 1988, John Douglas was challenged to solve a notorious historical mystery. A television production company asked if he could profile Jack the Ripper for a two-hour live special marking the one hundredth anniversary of the Ripper’s murders. The FBI approved the project, and John asked me to assist him.

  Murder investigations in the late-nineteenth century weren’t nearly as professional as they are today or as well documented. Procedure was especially deficient when the homicides were committed in slums like London’s Whitechapel district and when the victims were streetwalkers, as was true in the Ripper cases.

  John and I questioned whether enough hard facts were available a hundred years later for us to create a profile. We were happily surprised when the production company provided us with two volumes, each about three inches thick, of detailed information on the five murders.

  The binders contained autopsy and police reports, a great deal of background information on each of the victims, and maps detailing the area in which the murders occurred. They also held photographs of the victims after death.

  Jack the Ripper killed five prostitutes from August 31, 1888, to November 9, 1888. Such a crime series is commonplace today, barely worth mention in the news. Yet despite his brief and unexceptional career as an aberrant offender, Jack the Ripper is perhaps the best-known serial killer in history.

  What makes him so special?

  For one thing, the newspapers gave him a memorable nickname, which made him sound more interesting, which in turn sold more papers, which generated more coverage. We sometimes see the echoes of such media attention in today’s cases.

  Another important factor was the sexual mutilation committed on his victims. Jack’s postmortem slashing fueled the public’s fascination with him and his crimes. The Ripper also was never positively identified, and as a result wild accusations and public speculation could continue indefinitely—just as they have in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination, which many people still think remains unsolved.

  In the JFK case, government conspiracy has been a favorite explanation for what occurred. In Jack the Ripper’s murders, conspiracy theorists predictably have singled out royalty for suspicion. Some have assigned guilt to a royal prince; others to the queen’s physician. Even a cover-up was alleged.

  We wanted to develop a profile based solely on facts. In the evidence binders we’d find the behavioral details we needed. We carefully pored over the two volumes, taking the murders step-by-step.

  Jack the Ripper’s first victim was Mary Ann Polly Nichols, forty-two, an alcoholic derelict last seen alive at 3:00 A.M. Nichols was found dead on a narrow Whitechapel street called Bucks Row.

  Her jaw was bruised and her throat had been cut from left to right. Two postmortem knife incisions had been made on her stomach in the shape of a reverse L, and she was disemboweled. Mary Nichols was missing two teeth, and her ring finger was abraded. Obviously, she was either stunned or rendered unconscious by the blow to her jaw. Her throat was then cut and mutilation ensued.

  In profiling terms the Ripper was a disorganized lust murderer. He appears to have brought his own weapon with him, but the rest of his crime was highly impetuous. He apparently attacked and left his victim in an open area and made no effort to conceal his crime. The records show no documented evidence of penis penetration, so we can conclude that he did not rape his victim. Jack’s instrument of psychosexual gratification was his knife.

  Victim number two was “Dark Annie” Chapman, a forty-seven-year-old prostitute, also a drunk and a derelict. She was murdered in the early morning hours of September 8, 1888, and was found in the backyard of a building on Hanbury Street in Whitechapel, approximately six blocks from the scene of the Nichols murder.

  Chapman was discovered on her back, clothed, with her head propped against the wall of the building. Like Mary Nichols, she was missing two teeth. Her killer had struck her in the right cheek, which was swollen, and cut her throat from left to right. Jack performed a long, linear incision on Chapman’s front and rear torso, and she, too, had been disemboweled.

  Her uterus, vagina, bladder, and intestines were found draped over her right shoulder. Her abdominal wall was missing, as were her ovaries. The area of her sternum was swollen. Her left hand lay across her breast. She also had an abraded ring finger.

  The close similarities between these first two crimes quickly established in our minds a strong probability that the same killer was responsible for both. We discounted the fact that the victims were missing two teeth; this seemed more likely the consequence of chronic poor health, not Jack’s fist or a club. The best explanation for the abraded fingers was that someone had torn rings from them. Whether Jack the Ripper took them, we couldn’t say, but in my opinion the thief probably was a passerby. If Jack was taking souvenirs in this way, it seems that he would have continued to do so in the subsequent three killings. But he didn’t.

  After all, Whitechapel was hardly a quality neighborhood. Robbing the dead probably wasn’t all that unusual.

  Jack the Ripper’s third victim was Elizabeth Stride, forty-five, also a prostitute and drunk. Stride was murdered in the early morning hours of September 30, 1888, in a courtyard off Benner Street, about six blocks from the first murder and slightly farther from where he killed Chapman.

  The Ripper was interrupted by a horse and carriage that entered the courtyard, and he fled without being able to act out his grotesque mutilation fantasies on Stride. She was found fully clothed and lying on her back. Her shoulder and clavicle were bruised, and like the other victims, her throat had been cut from left to right.

  John and I surmised that the postmortem mutilation was a physical manifestation of Jack’s tremendous hatred and fear of women, common among lust killers. With the act of mutilation he achieved psychosexual relief and gratification.

  With his third victim he was denied that sexual experience. The Ripper was unfulfilled. He could be expected, if possible, to immediately resume hunting for a victim to complete his objective. And that is what happened.

  A short while later, that same morning in Mitre Square, about thirteen blocks away from the Hanbury Street address where Annie Chapman had been killed, he encountered victim number four, forty-three-year-old Katherine Eddowes.

  Eddowes was discovered lying on her back with her clothing pulled up. Her throat had been cut from left to right. Her nose and one of her ears
had been cut off. A diagonal incision was made across her abdomen, and a linear incision had been made down her back. Her left kidney was missing, and her intestines were drawn out. A portion of intestine lay beside her to the left. She also was stabbed in the liver. There were cuts to her scalp, and her face had been mutilated.

  Jack the Ripper needed to finish the interrupted sexual experience he had begun with the murder of Elizabeth Stride. As is so frequently the case with aberrant murderers, Eddowes was a victim of opportunity, whose ill fortune it was to be alone and vulnerable when Jack found her.

  Now we have four victims, all of a similar demographic type, and all killed within a rather small geographic area. What about the fact that they were all prostitutes?

  It seems that whenever someone starts murdering prostitutes, some “expert” will tell the press, “The person who is perpetrating these heinous crimes is a man who has a great deal of anger and hostility toward females. He selects prostitutes because they symbolize the evil he perceives in some significant female in his life.”

  Such comments are of little use to investigators.

  In my opinion, there are two reasons why serial killers select prostitutes as victims: They are available, and they are vulnerable. When I lecture about victim selection and why prostitutes so commonly are chosen, I ask my audiences to consider five key questions about street prostitutes:

  With whom will a street prostitute go? Anyone.

  Why will a street prostitute go with anyone? Money.

  Where will a street prostitute go with anyone? Anywhere.

  When will a street prostitute go with anyone? Anytime.

  Who cares when street prostitutes are murdered? Hardly anyone.

  For these reasons, prostitutes are an all-too-easy target group for violent offenders.

  Jack committed his fifth and final murder on November 2, 1888, in Millers Court, within two blocks of the Chapman homicide. His victim, Mary Kelly, was also a prostitute, alcoholic, and derelict. But twenty-five-year-old Kelly was by far the youngest of Jack’s murder victims.

  The other departure in this murder was that the unfortunate woman entertained the Ripper in her one-room flat. For the first time Jack had a location where he could act out his aberrant fantasies at length and with little fear of being disturbed.

  He brutalized Kelly’s face and, as was his habit, cut his victim’s throat from left to right. Then he cut off her ears and breasts and might even have attempted to skin her face and lower legs. He placed Kelly’s heart and kidneys on a bedside table. Her liver lay by her right thigh. Her intestines were draped over a mirror.

  After preparing the profile, John Douglas and I flew to Los Angeles. There we met the three additional participants on the program: William Eckerd (since deceased), a forensic pathologist whom John and I both knew; Anne Mallalieu, an English judge or “queen’s counsel” and William Waddell, a British criminologist and then curator of Scotland Yard’s Black Museum, which houses relics of some of the darkest crimes in English history. The English actor Peter Ustinov would emcee the show.

  A surprise awaited us the first day on the set. Besides producing the profile, we were to consider five suspects that the production company’s investigative research had identified. They were:

  DR. ROSLYN DONSTON, a journalist and selfproclaimed satanist who had studied medicine and lived in Whitechapel.

  MONTAGUE JOHN DRUITT, an emotionally troubled schoolteacher and failed lawyer who committed suicide seven weeks after the final murder. His father and uncle were prominent surgeons.

  SIR WILLIAM GULL, Queen Victoria’s personal physician and the central figure in what has come to be known as “the royal conspiracy,” an alleged plot to eliminate prostitutes who were blackmailing members of the royal family.

  PRINCE ALBERT VICTOR, the queen’s twenty-eight-year-old grandson and an avid hunter.

  AARON KOSMINSKI, a psychotic Polish immigrant and Whitechapel-area resident, known for his intense hatred toward women.

  Previous investigators of the case paid a lot of attention to the “Dear Boss” letters, published in a London newspaper, in which Jack the Ripper allegedly claimed credit for the killings. Yet Bill Waddell of Scotland Yard reported on the program that the Home Office’s forensic laboratory had scientifically examined the “Dear Boss” letters and declared them a hoax.

  John Douglas added a behavioral analysis to the letters. He explained that while some serial killers do communicate with the police or the press in an effort to demonstrate their superiority, lust murderers of Jack’s type do not. After perusing the packet, we surmised that someone of superior intelligence was attempting to assume Jack’s voice. I added that Jack probably didn’t want to attract attention of any sort and was more likely to have withdrawn into himself for a period after each homicide.

  During the program all five panelists were asked which of the suspects we would eliminate immediately from consideration and why. Bill Eckerd said he would disregard Sir William Gull because the doctor had been ill during the time of the murders. He added that the mutilations did not appear to have been the work of a trained physician.

  Bill Waddell eliminated Druitt. He did so based on information he said had only recently come to his attention and which he did not disclose.

  Judge Mallalieu struck Prince Albert from the list on the strength of his strong alibis for three of them. She explained that during the Nichols and Chapman murders, the prince was grouse hunting in Scotland. At the time of Mary Kelly’s killing, he was hunting pheasant in Norfolk.

  I ruled out Dr. Gull as well but on behavioral grounds. First, he was fifty-two years old. In our experience, much younger men commit this type of crime. Second, Dr. Gull was too cultivated to have killed in the way Jack did. He would not have relished the blood and gore being splashed on him. A ligature was a much likelier weapon for him. Finally, Dr. Gull had suffered a stroke two years earlier in 1886 and was in poor physical condition. I didn’t think he was physically strong enough to kill as Jack did.

  John Douglas eliminated Dr. Donston, who had followed the Ripper investigation very closely and injected himself into the process with his opinions, behavior we often see in particular types of sexual killers. But as John explained, Dr. Donston was much too old to have committed the Ripper murders. Additionally, as an avid student of witchcraft, he could be expected to leave some sign of his satanic beliefs at the murder sites.

  Both John and I believed Donston would have taken the women to some preselected location he preferred, rather than killing them opportunistically in the street or, in Mary Kelly’s case, her flat. John also reiterated Dr. Eckerd’s point that Jack the Ripper had no evident surgical skills.

  After all the panel members explained which suspect they felt should be eliminated, I offered a brief introduction to profiling, explaining what materials and information are necessary. Then John began presenting the profile.

  He explained that Jack was like a predatory animal who would be out nightly looking for weak and susceptible victims for his grotesque sexual fantasies. Douglas told the TV audience that with such a killer, you do not expect to see a definite time pattern because he kills as opportunity presents itself. He added that such killers return to the scenes of their successful crimes.

  He surmised that Jack was a white male in his mid-to-late-twenties and of average intelligence. John and I agreed that Jack the Ripper wasn’t nearly as clever as he was lucky.

  I then said that we thought Jack was single, never married, and probably did not socialize with women at all. He would have had a great deal of difficulty interacting appropriately with anyone, but particularly women.

  I said Jack lived very close to the crime scenes because we know that such offenders generally start killing within very close proximity to their homes. If Jack was employed, it would have been at menial work requiring little or no contact with others.

  I went on to say that, as a child, Jack probably set fires and abused animals and that as an
adult his erratic behavior would have brought him to the attention of the police at some point.

  John added that Jack seemed to have come from a broken home and was raised by a dominant female who physically abused him, possibly even sexually abused him. Jack would have internalized this abuse rather than act it out toward those closest to him.

  John described Jack as socially withdrawn, a loner, having poor personal hygiene, and a disheveled appearance. Such characteristics are hallmarks of this type of offender. He said that people who know this type of person often report he is nocturnal, preferring the hours of darkness to daytime. When he is out at night, he typically covers great distances on foot.

  Peter Ustinov turned to me again. I said that Jack simultaneously hated and feared women. They intimidated him, and his feeling of inadequacy was evident in the way he killed. I noted that the Ripper had subdued and murdered his victims quickly. There was no evidence that he savored this part of his crime; he didn’t torture the women or prolong their deaths. He attacked suddenly and without warning, quickly cutting their throats.

  The psychosexually pleasurable part came for him in the acts following death. By displacing or removing his victims’ sexual parts and organs, Jack was neutering or desexing them so that they were no longer women to be feared.

  The television audience was invited to vote for their favorite suspect throughout the program. Many cast their votes within fifteen minutes of the beginning of the show, meaning that our discussion had minimal impact on their opinions. The results:

  Donston—14%

  Druitt—18%

  Gull—25%

  Prince Albert—23%

  Kosminski—20%

  Then Ustinov polled the panel. Dr. Eckerd said that based on his experience as a pathologist in similar crimes, the killer usually was someone with severe mental problems. Eckerd therefore chose Kosminski. Anne Mallalieu explained that while there was insufficient evidence to charge any one of the suspects, she felt that Kosminski was the strongest suspect, and listed four reasons: