The murder cases from the last chapter also give us another criterion which is equally well known from thousands of other cases of serious crimes: that the Ripper probably did not start out his odious career with murder and mutilation but with lesser crimes - perhaps even very minor offences - and the police were very likely to have been aware of these crimes.

A curious component of criminal mentality - especially that of many serial killers - is the strange desire to be involved somehow with the investigations of their own crimes. Sometimes, they march boldly into a police station to complain about the inefficiency of the police officers investigating their own crime, or write long letters of accusation against various people - usually officials of some nature - totally unconnected with the crime, and sometimes even offering to help the police in their investigation. This behaviour sometimes results in the criminal revisiting the site of the murder and Colin Wilson feels that this is largely to gloat over their dead victims, but this could be too simple an explanation. Wilson also believes that such serial killers are motivated to contact the police or others because of a suicidal element that is involved with sex crime but again this could be a gross over-simplification of the motives behind such behaviour. This strange behaviour - both the revisiting of the murder site and the bizarre desire to be involved in the investigation - could perhaps have its origins more in the combination of the powerful guilt mechanisms of the individuals concerned and an overpowering desire to be there on the ’pulse’ of things. But no matter to the psychology of the behaviour, it suits our present purpose to know that it exists as a few examples will illustrate.

John Haigh was a classic example, walking into Chelsea Police Station with a woman on his arm in 1949 to report the disappearance of a woman that he had murdered two days earlier. To assist the police even further he gave them his business address where he had murdered Mrs Oliver Durand-Deacon and then melted her body down in a tub of acid. It didn’t take the police long to realize that they had a mass-murderer on their hands who specialized in killing people whose fortune he wanted to ‘inherit’.

When the remains of two bodies were found in a stream in Scotland in 1953 the police and forensic experts really had their work cut out for them as the bodies had been hacked to pieces and the skin removed from the faces so that identification would be impossible. For the same reason the fingertips of one body were also removed. But when a wild, dishevelled man burst into a Lancaster police station to complain about the disappearance of his wife, and police harassment - when there had been none - the police knew they had a suspect. Not satisfied with that performance the man, Dr Buck Ruxton, made another appearance at the police station a few days later where he wept across the counter complaining that his neighbours were spreading malicious rumours that he had killed his wife and maid. Eventually the forensic trail also led back to him and he was finally and successfully prosecuted for the brutal murder of his wife and maid but many involved in the case remained convinced that if the good doctor had not lost his nerve and gone whining to the police he would have got away with the perfect double murder.

In 1946 Neville Heath took a woman to his London hotel room and in the course of a sadistic session - in which it seems the woman was a willing partner - lost control of himself and killed her. He then travelled down to Bournemouth murdering another woman on the beach and then explaining to yet another lady he met that a woman had been murdered by persons unknown in his hotel room in London. She strongly advised him to go to the local police, which he astonishingly did, explaining to the perplexed officials - who immediately recognised him from his description which had appeared in every national newspaper in the country - that he might be able to help them with their enquiry. He was not intending to confess, his offer of help seems to have been genuine enough from his own point of view as he had a few days after the first murder written to the officer in charge of the investigation in London offering his help and promising to supply the weapon that was used to mutilate and murder the woman which he had found by chance in his hotel room. He had also complained bitterly to the other guests at his Bournemouth hotel that a man capable of such a terrible act must have been a ‘sexual maniac’.

Graham Backhouse led the Bristol police a merry trail of murder and mayhem when he complained to them that he was the victim of a conspiracy to murder him. The police were at first impressed with the evidence of threatening phone calls and letters accusing Backhouse of various misdeeds, and when his wife was blown up in his car - her own car had mysteriously broken down at the time - by a home-made bomb they were convinced that someone was indeed determined to murder Mr Backhouse and placed him under strict police protection. The first doubts must have crept into their minds when Backhouse made an angry phone call demanding that the police be removed from his property at once. When a few days later the police were called back to Backhouse’s farm it was to find a bleeding and wounded Backhouse and a neighbour dead on the floor of the kitchen. He claimed that the neighbour had attacked him, so he had shot him twice with a shotgun in the chest.

Backhouse’s explanation was that this was the man who had sent the letters, made the telephone calls and tried to blow him up in his car. At first the police were inclined to believe him, but the forensic experts called to the crime scene were not so easily convinced and believed that Backhouse had staged the attack and had, in fact, murdered his neighbour in cold blood. They eventually went on to prove this and when it was found that Backhouse had increased the insurance premium on his wife from £50,000 to £100,000 a month before the car bomb attack they knew they had their man and his motive. It is obvious that if Backhouse had not demanded the police to withdraw their protection and then gone on to murder his neighbour, things would have cooled down. He would have also been allowed to raise the money he needed in a more conventional manner, but instead he directly implicated himself by complaining about the very police who were there to supposedly protect him.

Deeply religious and a member of an organization, the Alliance of Honour, that demanded of its members purity in body as well as mind, Norman Thorne nevertheless murdered and mutilated his fiancee, Elsie Cameron, in 1924 on his chicken farm in Sussex. She had tried to force him into marriage by claiming to be pregnant from him, while he maintained that they had never had sexual intercourse, and he was anyway in love with another. So he murdered his fiancee, dismembered her and then buried her in the soil of one of his chicken coops. Seven days later - all spruced up and in his best Sunday suit - he presented himself at the local police station and expressed his desire to assist them in every way he could in the search for his missing fiancee. Later he even had the cheek to have a photograph taken of himself and the investigating police officers stood together in the very chicken coop where his once intended bride lay under the ground in several gruesome bundles.

Dr Thomas Neill Cream was a legendary example of a murderer who just couldn’t leave his wicked deeds to die like his poisoned victims in 1891. He murdered his prostitute victims almost long distance so to speak, by giving them small bottles of ‘medicine’ to take later. He then proceeded to write letters to all and sundry accusing a variety of public figures of the murders. He even marched into Scotland Yard on one occasion and demanded that the police stop following him about - which they weren’t - and there is no doubt about the fact that when he was hanged in 1892 he had put the rope round his neck himself.

The final case is perhaps the most audacious out of the lot and concerns a murderer who became known as the ’Zodiac Killer’ because he always used the symbol of the Zodiac when communicating with the police about his crimes. Between 1968 and 1969 ’Zodiac’ shot or stabbed a number of victims killing five of them and almost every time he had just killed someone, he directly phoned the San Francisco police to tell them where they could find the bodies, and then ranted and raved at them for their continuing incompetence and inefficiency in catching the killer.

So as can be seen there is yet another criterion which could possibly point to the identity of Jack the Ripper. Someone who acted in a similar fashion, presenting themselves to the police to offer assistance, berating the police for their incompetence, complaining of police harassment or writing strange letters to the press or people in authority.

Using these main criteria we will attempt to profile the suspects that are left after winnowing the Ripperologists pack of 139 down to a reasonable number by a process of radical elimination. But before doing that there are several other factors of modern murder investigation to be considered which may be of great help later.

The FBI Psychological Profiling Unit believe that in many cases of mutilation murder the more vicious the mutilation, particularly to the face of the victim, then the closer the relationship between murderer and victim. Remember the post-mortem report on Mary Jane Kelly where it was detailed that her face was almost totally devoid of flesh. Sir Melville Leslie Macnaghten, the chief constable of Scotland Yard CID shortly after the Ripper murders, made the crucial observation about the murders that the ’fury of the mutilations increased in each case’ and this is indeed a most pertinent observation.

Another point that emerges from modern police hunts for serial killers is that as the police operation gains momentum, the killer has less and less room in which to operate. As the hunt intensifies the killer’s territory becomes squeezed and he is forced to operate in ever decreasing circles until he either stops murdering, moves away, commits suicide, gives himself up, or starts to murder on his own doorstep. The ’Jack the Stripper’ murders of the mid 1960’s are a classic example of this. The killer left his victims, strangled and naked, in the River Thames. It was obvious that the killer was committing the crimes elsewhere and then dumping the bodies in the river. However, police activity became so intense in the killer’s area that he was forced to dump his last victim at the actual murder site - his place of work. He then went on to commit suicide as the police had tightened the net to such an extreme that the killer knew he was about to be apprehended and furthermore had absolutely no chance of ensnaring more victims. His murderous career was well and truly over. This must have been even more so for Jack the Ripper than for the serial killer today, because he did not possess the easy mobility that we do now. The modern serial killer often makes use of the motorway systems available today in most countries and this makes him damn difficult to catch. But the Ripper was probably confined to foot and as the police net drew closer round him he may have been forced to kill increasingly nearer to his home base.

Chief Inspector Walter Dew, famous as the detective who arrested Crippen, was personally involved with only one of the Ripper murders - that of Mary Jane Kelly - but in his book ‘I Caught Crippen’ he also made a valuable observation concerning the Ripper and his victims. He was amazed that the prostitutes of the Whitechapel area even after the horrific murder of Annie Chapman proved to be such easy targets for the killer and he posed the question: ‘Is it feasible that there was something about him which placed him above suspicion?’

The answer to his question must surely be yes. Though in saying so we mustn’t forget the impoverished circumstances of the Ripper’s victims. In every case - excepting perhaps that of Long Liz Stride - the women were forced to go out on the streets late at night to try and earn the four pence by selling their bodies to pay for their bed for the night. Mary Jane Kelly was killed in her room that is true, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that she was months behind with her rent and on the point of being turned out of her lodgings. In other words she was also a desperate woman. This is an important point to note and it’s likely that the women killed by the Ripper were more concerned about securing their four pence than over the appearance of their potential customer. Extreme poverty produces people who are prepared to take extreme risks. But that doesn’t rule out the point that Inspector Dew raises for it would have certainly been easier for the Ripper if he had been someone above suspicion, a familiar face well-known to the Dorset Street prostitutes, the boyfriend of someone they all knew, a policeman, or someone who was prepared to help them out with a few pence when they were down on their luck. It is certainly tempting to think that this could have been the case, and the important statement of the FBI that the more vicious the mutilation the closer the relationship between killer and victim, plus Sir Melville Macnaghten’s observation that the ‘fury of the mutilations increased in each case’ also leads one in that direction. This then is another useful criteria: to look for someone whose position or relationship to the victims would allow him to carry out the murders without undue difficulty.

Finally to the Ripper himself. What sort of man should we be looking for? Has one hundred years intensive study into the criminal mind brought us closer to being able to identify the type of killer the Ripper was? Perhaps.

If one studies similar cases that have occurred since Jack the Ripper then certainly different types of killers are easily recognizable. There appear to be four distinct types of killer in these serial murders. One is the full-blown psychotic. A chronic paranoid schizophrenic, who hears voices ordering him to kill, voices from demons or other strange sources like in one case from ‘Jesus Christ and Company’. Herb Mullin killed over a dozen people in California in the early 1970’s because voices had told him to do it and he assured his captors that it was Satan himself who was behind the deeds. The ‘Son of Sam’, David Berkowitz, who killed six people and wounded another seven in random shootings in New York during 1976 was similarly driven by the voices of demons. Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ also claimed that demons had been behind his vicious murders. The mass murderer and cannibal Albert Fish who claimed to have murdered 400 children in the USA between 1910 and 1934 had been suffering from delusions for years where voices had been urging him to kill. Fish is a highly important case as it shows that the full blown psychotic maniac can appear to an outsider to be quite normal, so normal that one of the psychiatrists, Frederick Wertham, who examined him in jail described him thus: ‘a meek and innocuous little old man, gentle and benevolent, friendly and polite. If you wanted someone to entrust your children to, he would be the one you choose’. A man in fact who could pull a curtain down on the complete and utter maniac inside and display to the world this gentle fatherly figure, but when the curtain lifted here was a man whose voices told him to murder hundreds of small children. He would then eat them and send boasting letters to the parents of his victims describing ‘how sweet her tender little body was, roasted in the oven. It took me nine days to eat her.’

So it is clear that it would be a great mistake to think of a paranoid schizophrenic as always being the wild, dishevelled and disorganized killer with blazing eyes and drooling saliva that is usually in our imagination, and it is a mistake that many authors and researchers have made and still continue to make today. No, sometimes these killers are unusually adept at hiding their demons and voices, like Earle Leonard Nelson who travelled the USA strangling and mutilating women in the 1920’s, with his Bible clutched in one hand and a comforting prayer on his lips to disarm his victims. As Ronald Markman, the well-known American forensic psychiatrist and attorney remarks:

‘Psychosis is a medical condition in which the person loses contact with reality in a profound manner. Thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and behaviour become severely disorganized and the personality begins to deteriorate. The psychotic person displays distorted perceptions, delusion, and hallucinations, and is compelled by these misperceptions to respond to people or situations in a bizarre, disorganized ‘crazy’ fashion… Psychosis comes and goes. A person who seems perfectly normal one minute can deteriorate into a psychotic ‘episode’ within minutes. If he commits a terrible crime during his psychotic episode, he may believe he is actually doing his victim a favour’.

Ted Bundy - who was featured in an earlier chapter - was a perfect specimen of the strange beast that typifies the second category: the controlled, calculating murderer. Intelligent, cool, charming and with a smile that could and did disarm a hostile jury trying him for murder, in fact one of the females on the jury later became his girlfriend while he was in prison. Here was a man who carefully planned his kidnapping of young girls, donning false plaster casts on his arm or using crutches so that the young girls helped this handsome smiling young man back to his car, probably hoping for a date with him. But when the handcuffs were snapped on their wrists with astonishing speed and they were brutally shoved into the back of the car, they quickly saw the other side of Bundy. He was cold and calculating with absolutely no feelings for his victims, they were mere objects to serve his dreadful purpose. His treatment of the girls he kidnapped, brutally raped and then murdered was horrific.

Norman Collins is another extreme example of the controlled killer, to all intents and purposes a normal healthy young man who had no trouble getting regular dates with the girls of Ann Arbor. Seven brutal murders later in 1970, he sat in court as if carved from stone as the evidence of his appalling crimes was read out. If anyone had dared to suggest to either of these two killers that devils or demons were behind their work they would have been extremely offended.

They enjoyed the power of having their victims completely under their control, their sexual slaves to abuse and then snuff out when they had satisfied their lust. This is the type of killer that Markman calls ‘Sociopaths’. They do not kill because they feel threatened but ‘because they totally lack inner restraints, or conscience, in the first place. Sociopaths kill when the outer restraints - policeman and other restricting circumstances - are missing and the death of the victim means removing an obstacle or enjoying a godlike rush of power over another person’.

The out and out sex maniac is another category. A man who just cannot satisfy his sexual appetite and has to go out and rape… and then to avoid capture he murders his victims. This is the type of killer who given unlimited freedom to indulge his highly charged sexual appetite would probably not kill again. This category of sex criminal is not like the controlled killer at all. Generally he has no charm or manners and carries out his attacks in a brutal haphazard manner. John Duffy, the ‘Railway Rapist’ of the 1980’s in the London area clearly belongs to this group, a brute of a man, skilled in martial arts, a wife beater who picked his victims as opportunity presented them, forced them into brutal sex and only began murdering his victims when one girl he had raped met him in a social context later on and almost identified him. He was simply after brutal sex with different partners, a desire that he could have employed in a brothel if he had possessed the wealth to do so, the murder was necessary only to avoid capture.

The fourth type is somewhat rarer than the others: the frustrated little man whose ego is not strong enough for him to engage in normal social and sexual activity. John Reginald Christie is the classic example, murdering seven women so that he could have sexual relations with them, because he was incapable of doing so while the women were still alive. Joachim Kroll did exactly the same thing in Germany in the 1960’s and 1970’s, killing his young female victims because he was too shy to attempt sexual contact with a living person.

Of course there are other types of serial killers and of course there are murderers who just can’t be categorized. Revenge, jealousy, love and dozens of other human emotions or conditions can all power the motivation to commit murder - even something so simple as ‘not liking Mondays’ can provide the motive for mass murder as one famous case showed. But it is clear that as the picture of the serial killer has emerged over the last one hundred years, we can see that the killers are, in general, very particular types of animal that usually fall into one of the aforementioned categories.

What also emerges is that the killers of category one, the psychotics driven by demons and devils, are not sexual murderers in the real sense of the word. They are savage slayers and mutilators, but they do not kill to satisfy their physical sexual lust. However the killers of category two, three and four are most certainly sexual murderers, as they intend to have sexual contact with their victims, dead or alive. This is perhaps the most important distinction to be made in the case of Jack the Ripper - and one that legions of authors, theorists and Ripperologists have blatantly disregarded for over one hundred years - because as already mentioned Jack the Ripper had absolutely no sexual contact with any of his victims.

Subsequently, this seems to strongly indicate that he fits into the category of murderers who felt themselves guided and driven by demon voices, the psychotic paranoid schizophrenic. Here lies also the importance of the chapter devoted to the murder and mutilation of Mary Jane Kelly, as often this type of killer is driven by quasi-religious motivations, like Earl Leonard Nelson, who was mentioned earlier. He was a serious devotee of the Bible and it would appear from the mutilations carried out on Mary Jane Kelly that Jack the Ripper had also studied his Bible. But perhaps it is still too early to assume that the Ripper belongs to this or that category. However, at least we have another criterion to apply to our suspects, and this is helpful because we can safely assume that Jack the Ripper will fall into one of the categories we have listed above. It will be necessary, to give us firm ground, to repeat the criteria when we come to examine the suspects, but before that it is also necessary to reduce the Ripperologists’ pack of suspects down to a manageable level.