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Glenn L Andersson
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Glenna
Post Number: 1701
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Friday, April 30, 2004 - 6:56 pm: |       |
Hi Don,
I also remember that, that Dahmer did his best to experiment in different ways in order to make the human body parts taste better.
So obviously he didn't commit to cannibalism for culinary reasons per ce, but used it as a method to keep the murdered victims as a part of himself, to stay with him forever. Now, there's a twisted guy...
All the best
Glenn Gustaf Lauritz Andersson
Crime historian, Sweden |
Glenn L Andersson
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Glenna
Post Number: 1705
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Friday, April 30, 2004 - 10:23 pm: | |
Welcome, Jeff. Just dig in here.
And good points.
All the best
Glenn Gustaf Lauritz Andersson
Crime historian, Sweden |
A Rusty Ol' Hound Dawg
Sergeant
Username: Burgho2004
Post Number: 20
Registered: 4-2004
| | Posted on Friday, April 30, 2004 - 10:26 pm: | |
I failed in an important distinction: I should have said "cannibalism, literal or figurative". What we see in these cases is a failure to grow past a certain point, and it doesn't matter if the IQ is 50 or 150, there will be a sameness.
I recently posted that I thought that the minimum IQ required to perpetrate the Whitechapel crimes would have been somewhere around 50, with an emphasis in training in the livestock industry, and proper Victorian dressing. Both of these are easily apprehended with sufficient reinforcement. The victims, as the primary orchestrators of the required discretion for committing crime, could have just as easily carried the subject to the sites for threepence. Or at least led him by hand. Maybe that was the disarming factor? Something to think about.
Yet we speak of der ubermenschen. Zodiac and BTK didn't like to get so up close and personal with their victims, though. They didn't strike with the same obsessive regularity. Dahmer did, and he was a very bright, scientifically experimental student. He thought maybe he could invoke the devil in his apartment, just like in "Rosemary's Baby". It amuses me to note that Roman Polanski always had a much higher budget than Cornwell, even as a dispatriot. Fictioneer or not, I'm sure he's well affected that Charlie's gang just missed him.
Strange world, this one. We are the strangers in the strange land, and Jack's remembered to wonder at the strangeness.
"Zietgeist" is another excellent word for "the signaling network" (the pheremonal communication among ants), Carl Jung's "collective unconscious" (archetype), instinct (the "ancestral memory"), or whatever we choose to call it.
I like to think that the reason we are all very preoccupied with crafting fictional villains like Lex Luthor, Hannibal Lecter, "The Joker", or other such evil genii is to confirm for ourselves the understanding we all share that there is are dimensions to our success as humans to which a measure of intellect just doesn't apply. Nothing new here, and SKs starkly confirm that reality for us. Its one of the reasons we have such enduring curiosity about these things. It's about genius idiots and idiot genii. Sharks, Edison, cockroaches, Einstien.
A genius who performs disections on the footpaths in one of the busiest, most densely populated communities in the world is ubermenschen. And yet: it could be true.
Jack is a new improved kind of idiot. Blitz attack, open up, eat. New and Improved!
Cheers,
Burgho |
Dan Norder
Detective Sergeant
Username: Dannorder
Post Number: 54
Registered: 4-2004
| | Posted on Friday, April 30, 2004 - 11:11 pm: | |
Hi Burgho,
""Zietgeist" is another excellent word for "the signaling network" (the pheremonal communication among ants), Carl Jung's "collective unconscious" (archetype), instinct (the "ancestral memory"), or whatever we choose to call it."
Zeitgeist, actually, is the "spirit of the time." It's the culture's beliefs, thoughts and patterns, as compared to that from different times or cultures. It has nothing to do with ants or any comparison I can see, and is pretty much completely opposite of instinct and Jung's collective unconscious idea.
we are all very preoccupied with crafting fictional villains like Lex Luthor, Hannibal Lecter, "The Joker", or other such evil genii
Yes, some people want to craft elaborate stories of evil geniuses (and occasionally evil genii too, but let's leave the paranormal out of this), but then that doesn't change the fact that there are actual evil people out there, some more crafty than others.
Jack was undoubtedly evil, but his intelligence level can be debated. The less intelligent he was, the more you have to trust that he was just lucky. To me, the amount of luck required for someone with a 50 IQ to pull off even just three of the five canonical killings is astronomical.
Dan Norder, editor, Ripper Notes |
Frank van Oploo
Inspector
Username: Franko
Post Number: 278
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, May 01, 2004 - 8:38 am: | |
Hi Natalie and Mishter Lusk,
If the Ripper was the showman you think he was, I would have expected more show, more taunting, more that would draw attention to him. However, there’s nothing like this to conclusively link him to.
If he were a showman, for instance I would have expected him to write clear and taunting messages that could easily be proven to have been his. He might perhaps have written letter beforehand and put it in a pocket of one of his victims. Or he could have propped one or more of his victims up against a wall or fence in some specific pose. Or he could have put a flower in his victims’ hair. Things like that.
But instead, he seems to have left the outdoor crime scenes when he thought he could no longer stay. Even in Kelly’s case, where he could have taken the time to do what he wanted, he didn’t do anything of the kind, besides extensively mutilating her of course. Furthermore, there’s the Goulston Street graffito, which, first of all, is not clearly his and, secondly, is not a very clear message. There are the ‘Dear Boss’ communications and all others alike, which are not clearly the Ripper’s. In fact, they are generally considered hoaxes.
And there’s the Lusk letter, which wasn’t signed ‘Jack the Ripper’, a name that had become the generally accepted name by both public and police for the Whitechapel murderer, and which was accompanied by half a kidney. If this letter was written by the Ripper, it seems to me that the most important message was that he, and only he, was the Whitechapel murderer, not someone calling himself ‘Jack the Ripper’. The fact that the writer didn’t give himself a ‘trade name’ to me indicates that he wasn’t looking for attention or notoriety. Although writing that he ate the other half of the kidney could have been done only for shock value and as such does fit a showman theory, I would have expected a much longer and taunting letter if he really was a showman.
Now as to the eating of the kidney, like Caz wrote earlier, there is no reason to believe a murderer's word any more than a hoaxer's. So either could have lied about having eaten part of the kidney for shock value. On the other hand, it is common behaviour for serial killers to eat body parts. Richard Chase, who was also a mutilating killer, is a good example. And I agree with Glenn, who wrote that if the Ripper indulged in cannibalism, it would signify a part of his sexual fantasy and/or to gain final, ultimate control or power over his victims.
All the best,
Frank
|
A Rusty Ol' Hound Dawg
Sergeant
Username: Burgho2004
Post Number: 21
Registered: 4-2004
| | Posted on Saturday, May 01, 2004 - 11:09 am: | |
"Sex and the Serial Killer". It's also about Hannibal Lecter, a tall, dark, handsome and mysterious provender of exquisite cuisine. The Mr. Big who ran off with Clarice's heart in his teeth.
The DVD collection of the HBO series "Sex In The City" was such a common choice as a Christmas gift last year that it has now become almost a standard of common literacy in the northern hemisphere of the new world.
The comedy/drama details in it's running extent the neurotogenic on-again/off-again love affair between a professional research journalist - an honest, committed truth seeker - and a mysterious, shady, unimaginably powerful ("the next Donald Trump" - episode 1) unnamed figure called "Mr. Big".
The drama part heightens and overcomes the comedy as "Mr. Big", since married to a georgeous, vivacious, young Parisian ingenue, begins to stalk the heroic grail seeker, and rapes her in an elevator in a hotel.
But the research historian likes it. And so she begins an illicit affair with this unnamed, unmasked power prince.
Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Men are trained to be attackers, and women are trained to be victims. It's the dance of ages. It's our favorite song. Put another quarter in the jukebox, baby.
Mary's heart was stolen by a tall, dark, shadowy handsome, unnamed and ultimately powerful stranger in the night. Was it just what she wanted? Is this what girls dream of?
This story wasn't written by the predator, it was written, filmed, directed, and scored by the prey. The male stand-in could have been a complete meat puppet. IQ 50 or less.
We're never going to know who the Whitechapel ripper was. Ripperology is dead. But for those of us who delve 116 years in the past looking for particular answers, it could be that the Ripperology adventure has just begun.
Welcome, my daughter.
Welcome to the machine.
Where have you been?
It's OK, we know just where you've been.
What did you dream?
It's OK, we sold you in threepence rum just what to dream.
Cheers,
Burgho |
Natalie Severn
Chief Inspector
Username: Severn
Post Number: 764
Registered: 11-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, May 01, 2004 - 12:43 pm: | |
Just a couple of quick points:
Dan,you say Jack was undoubtedly evil.
I don"t accept the concept of evil.I am not religious.
Jack may not anyway have been evil even by your definition but instead have had mental health problems["hearing voices directing him to do all these things---its possible].
If as David suggests he was a psychopath even then he could still have been genetically programmed as in the "extra chromosone factor that scientists and neurologists have put forward in the past to explain the condition.
Frank,I didnt mean a showman in quite that way but rather a person who likes to show off---in this case his ability to get away with murder under the noses of all the regular uniformed police and the large numbers of extra police that were drafted into Whitechapel to try to catch him.
This has been part of the fascination for so long, who was this mysteriuos killer who announced himself in the Autumn of 1888 and disappeared before Christmas?
I think there may be some exhibitionism in the "open air show" he put on for everyone---a show that did in fact produce the [probably intended] "shock/horror" visual effects that only he knew how to do [the cuts the "necklaces of flesh" the offensive positioning of the victims bodies etc] all this may have been part of his "act" so to speak.And it may simply have been the manifestation of a terrible illness---I haven"t ruled that out either.
It may too have been done by someone whose main motivation was violent sexual fantasies and this was how he got relief-awful but possible.
But currently I am thinking along the lines of the psychopath who quite enjoys it all,who can take it or leave it to some extent but its worth a try and nobody knows how much he enjoyed killing mother by proxy!
Best Natalie |
AP Wolf
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 1091
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, May 01, 2004 - 2:20 pm: | |
We don’t really know what ‘zeitgeist’ means; as a person fluent in the command language of German I personally would translate it as ‘Time Ghost’, but the meaning of the word has become a conception rather than a meaning anyway. The very word is designed to awaken something like a chord in us, its true purpose being magical and evoking.
It is a word rarely used by Germans.
They don’t like their own ‘zeitgeist’.
I like to use the word as a continuum, a contact between ‘then’ and ‘now’, for instance I would see the actions of any modern serial killer like Richard Chase as representing the ‘zeitgeist’ of Jack. Richard didn’t know why he was doing what he did, but he had a rational and well-documented historical basis for doing it. He was attempting to express, to articulate the deeds and missions of a long dead ‘super-villain’.
Most of us are happy enough to express and articulate our childish desire to be either a ‘super-villain’ or ‘super hero’ by dressing up in a batman or joker costume and jumping on our bike and screaming with joy as we rush down a hill with our capes spread out and enveloping the entire world with our ambitious desire to be ‘someone’.
This never leaves us. As I sit here with half a century of life behind me I still want to be the Green Hornet.
The rub is that some folk go out and kill other people rather than ride their bikes down the hill, and this behaviour is usually linked to an unhappy childhood where they have not been allowed to develop normal relationships with the fictional super heroes and villains, but have instead been confronted as children by the very real super villains of life, their parents or carers.
In Jack’s age he would have had far more super heroes and villains to relate and identify with, for it was the age of evil versus good, men were men and went out and conquered evil, or did evil and were conquered by good men, and women sat at home and stitched pretty tapestries of Tower Bridge…
Huh! Not in Whitechapel they didn’t.
They sold their scabby flesh to pay for bed and booze.
You see, the whores were the super-villains.
And Jack was the super-hero.
That’s how the men of the age really saw it.
And the men of our age still cling to that odd piece of history that seems to confirm their vague domination of the female species.
In a man’s world, good girls go to heaven, and whores go to hell.
I think that should suffice as an example of ‘zeitgeist’.
Now what about your ‘trophies’? And who mentioned ‘cannibalism?’
|
Glenn L Andersson
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Glenna
Post Number: 1709
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, May 01, 2004 - 2:45 pm: | |
Yes, AP,
What about it? 
All the best
Glenn Gustaf Lauritz Andersson
Crime historian, Sweden |
Robert Charles Linford
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Robert
Post Number: 2413
Registered: 3-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, May 01, 2004 - 2:59 pm: | |
Jack has half a kidney and gives Lusk the other half? My money's on H.G. Wells. In fact, I can almost hear Tommy Steel singing it.
Robert |
AP Wolf
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 1092
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, May 01, 2004 - 4:39 pm: | |
Well, Glenn
I suppose I’m just trying to say that it is very difficult for us now to peer into the mind of a boy who lived in 1888... We are only offered one narrow channel to do so, and that is the narrow channel of our present existence in 2004, and that I’m afraid is very restrictive.
If we extend that ‘zeitgeist’ backwards in time from 1888 we will find that we arrive in zones where it would be perfectly acceptable to slaughter a fellow human being and fry their kidneys to share with our close friends. Cannibalism only exists ‘now’ in our time zone, back then when it was quite common even in the 1880’s in PNG the locals would have been horrified if you had told them that to eat a fellow human being was neither polite or considerate. The folk of that era thought that what we call ‘cannibalism’ was just good tucker.
So what I’m trying to say, with difficulty, is that we cannot really measure Jack’s crimes with the knowledge and insight we have today because those crimes happened yesterday.
Just because we have snappy convenient terms to explain such behaviour today does not implicitly mean that they can be applied to crimes that took place before the terms came into use to explain them.
That might seem nonsensical, but see I like the raw and not the refined, because the more we refine something the more we move away from the original ingredient and end up with a dilution that has no resemblance to the original.
As an example of this dilution process which moves us further and further away from the true motives and consequences of Jack’s crimes, you must not move far from your present position, for just a click away is the aborted nightmare of Radka’s use of the ‘now’ to interpret the ‘then’.
My simple aim, all along, on these boards, is to get us back to the ‘then’.
And to the very devil with the ‘now’.
|
AP Wolf
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 1093
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, May 01, 2004 - 4:52 pm: | |
'Arf'a kidney is better than nuffink.'
Is that the one, Robert?
'Any old cod, any old cod... will do.'
I thought you to be a 'PG' man rather than a 'HG' man?
If your money is on Wells you better get a time machine. Actually for my money the 'Time Machine' provides a very clear insight into the subject we discuss now, but I won't bore you with that.
Good to hear from you again, my dear fellow. |
Glenn L Andersson
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Glenna
Post Number: 1712
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, May 01, 2004 - 5:18 pm: | |
I don't agree with you at all, AP, but I assume you'd figured that one out anyway.
I believe the knowledge we have about other killers and the experiences we can gain from police work is all we have if we want to study the case. Sure, we have a different social environment than we are used to today, we have different social codes, different living conditions etc. But that is something a historian like myself always take into account anyway.
But criminals of these types doesen't change over centuries of time - there is absolutely no reason to deduct, that it isn't the same driving forces that triggers a serial killer in the 19th than someone in our time.
To use our knowledge of crimes and criminals is the only way to avoid falling into the pit of Radka; it is when we don't use it, we end up with far-fetched theories and fiction.
All the best
Glenn Gustaf Lauritz Andersson
Crime historian, Sweden |
Robert Charles Linford
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Robert
Post Number: 2414
Registered: 3-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, May 01, 2004 - 5:25 pm: | |
AP, I think it went
"Half a sixpence
Is better than half a penny...."
Or, in terms of Jack and Kate :
"Half a kidney
Is better than half a pinny..."
One thing that occurs to me is, if the kidney was sent by a medical student, surely he could have got hold of a womb also, to add to the authenticity? Whereas, if it was sent by the murderer, he may have been loath to part with the womb...or had already eaten it...
Robert |
Glenn L Andersson
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Glenna
Post Number: 1714
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, May 01, 2004 - 5:31 pm: | |
I just have a question.
I am not sure, I think this may have been addressed before, but were human body parts from dissecting rooms and medical schools really preserved in red wine? This has bugged me a bit.
All the best
Glenn Gustaf Lauritz Andersson
Crime historian, Sweden |
David O'Flaherty
Inspector
Username: Oberlin
Post Number: 288
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, May 01, 2004 - 6:01 pm: | |
Hi, Glenn
I don't have a good handle on this subject, but here's a snippet from The Daily Telegraph, 27 September 1888 (regarding Wynne Baxter's medical student):
He desired them preserved, not in spirits of wine, the usual medium, but in glycerine, in order to preserve them in a flaccid condition. . .
If I've got this right, spirit of wine was a strong distilled wine, not the kind of table wine we might drink (well, I might drink it, but I think I'd die). It seems to have been a cheaper kind of preservative and so suitable for a school setting. That's opposed to glycerine, which sounds like a higher-end solution, because it kept organs in a more life-like state (per the Telegraph article).
But don't go by me--I'm just guessing. Maybe someone more in the know can confirm or correct.
Cheers,
Dave |
Glenn L Andersson
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Glenna
Post Number: 1715
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, May 01, 2004 - 6:06 pm: | |
OK, Dave.
Thank you for the information. Much appreciated.
All the best
Glenn Gustaf Lauritz Andersson
Crime historian, Sweden |
Dan Norder
Detective Sergeant
Username: Dannorder
Post Number: 59
Registered: 4-2004
| | Posted on Saturday, May 01, 2004 - 9:01 pm: | |
Well, here comes a hodge podge of replies...
Burgho,
"Sex and the Serial Killer"
Are you writing to try to get a point across or are you pitching a new cable TV series? 
Natalie,
"I don"t accept the concept of evil.I am not religious. Jack may not anyway have been evil even by your definition but instead have had mental health problems"
I'm not religious ether, but I find "evil" to be a reasonable word to describe purposefully selfish and harmful acts. I also think people can be both mentally ill and evil. The only scenario where Jack wouldn't be evil, by how I see things, would be if he were so completely out of it that he had no clue what he was doing, but I can't imagine how someone like that would end up with victims and escape in the narrow time frames available in many of the killings. It's theoretically possible (I don't know, maybe if some evil person who knew exactly what Jack was capable of guided him along like a dog on a leash and set him upon the victims, cleaning him up a little and escorting him away immediately after), but just doesn't seem plausible.
But then, granted, there is some subjectivity in there, both in how I define evil and in looking at the evidence.
A.P.,
"We don’t really know what ‘zeitgeist’ means"
We who? I know what it means, as I already posted above. You later end up using it fairly correctly (although your translation is awfully literal), so presumably you do too.
"Cannibalism only exists ‘now’ in our time zone, back then when it was quite common even in the 1880’s in PNG the locals would have been horrified if you had told them that to eat a fellow human being was neither polite or considerate."
Cannibalism was an abhorrent act in the vast majority of cultures throughout history. What a few inhabitants may have done in isolated Papua New Guinea in 1888 isn't relevant to London at the same time. Unless, of course, some Pacific Islander was successfully navigating through the population of the East End unseen.
There are a great many things that change through time and place, but there also a huge number of things that don't. Serial killers stretch back a long, long way with a wide variety of motives that line up with the same motives as today. What changes are some of the details, like whether they have cars available to tote bodies around and so forth.
Dan Norder, editor, Ripper Notes |
Alan Sharp
Chief Inspector
Username: Ash
Post Number: 580
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, May 02, 2004 - 4:57 am: | |
Glenn
Intesting you should ask about dissecting room procedures in 1888. I have just submitted my latest batch of Irish Times' to Stephen which should appear in a few days, but this is a section from the 13th September issue. It doesn't answer your question, and it is in reference to the arm found in Pimlico, but it is interesting in regard to the question of whether the Kidney could have come from a dissecting room.
The arm is still in the mortuary, and will be further examined by surgical experts. In regard to the theory that the arm might have been thrown on to the river by a medical student with a view to create a scare, our representative called at one of the chief London hospitals to-day. He was assured that the arm could not possibly have been removed by a student from any hospital dissecting room. Students are allowed to dissect only in the room set aside for that purpose. Under the Act of William IV, hospitals and medical schools are allowed to receive unclaimed bodies for the purposes of dissection, but 48 hours notice has to be given after death to the Inspector under the Act before the body can be removed from the place of decease, and then only after a certificate of death has been given. The bodies, after being dissected, must be buried in consecrated ground and within six weeks a certificate of burial must be forwarded to the Inspector. Under no circumstances are students allowed to take portions of bodies to their own homes; in fact they would be liable under the Act to heavy penalties for doing so. |
Natalie Severn
Chief Inspector
Username: Severn
Post Number: 772
Registered: 11-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, May 02, 2004 - 6:58 am: | |
Dan,The reason I dislike the word is because the "Rhetoric of Evil" has dominated world politics so much of late thereby enabling us to demonise various people we dislike to the extent that people like Saddam[yes the one in Iraq] who were once on perfectly friendly terms with our Dear leaders have gradually become our worst enemies and the justification for starting the most frightful wars---while the previously demonised Gadaffi has suddenly become our "friend"!Both are of the same ilk and as such cruel and despotic but somehow we manage to ignore a whole host of other potential"devils"dotted about the world[one in fact who we are in friendly terms with is said to boil those who cross him![from one of those states bordering Afghanistan].
So it would seem to me to have become rather an imprecise word which lends itself to various ambiguities lately.
Natalie |
Alex Chisholm
Detective Sergeant
Username: Alex
Post Number: 95
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, May 02, 2004 - 8:37 am: | |
Howdy
Another view of the dissecting room, slightly different from the Irish Times extract posted by Alan, can be found in the following extract from the East London Advertiser, 21 January 1888, page 3.
HORRORS OF THE DISSECTING ROOM.
“The public,” writes a correspondent, “is blissfully ignorant of the treatment paupers’ bodies really receive in dissecting rooms. The Act of Parliament, which provides that no body be mutilated beyond a certain inevitable extent, is systematically ignored and broken. The following is an outline of the system pursued in at least one great London hospital, and perhaps in many. A body is received (paupers who die and whose bodies are unclaimed by friends are all sent to hospitals), and a sum, as much as £5 in some cases, allowed for it. All particulars relating to the body are then entered in a book, and an identifying number put upon the corpse, which is then ‘put in pickle’ until required. This may be in a week, a month, or a year, according to the demand. When a call is made for a body it is fished out of the pickle, and taken to the dissecting room. Here it is apportioned among the various applying students, at certain fixed prices for different parts. One wants a forearm, another a foot, hand, &c. The whole body is sold in this way, the parts being dissected off as required. Each student has a locker in which he keeps his portion, a heavy penalty attaching to removing any piece of human flesh from the precincts of the hospital. During the cutting up of the body and subsequent dissection of its parts, a good many pieces are thrown upon the floor of the room. A porter is employed who goes round at intervals with a brush and pan collecting these morsels, which are removed to a cellar. In due time follow all the other pieces of flesh, bones, &c. These are all thrown into one heap in the cellar. It must be understood that perhaps half-a-dozen bodies are ‘going’ at one time in the dissecting room, and this heap is composed of fragments of all. In the cellar are a pair of scales and some ordinary workhouse ‘shell’ coffins. When not occupied in sweeping up the bits, the porter is engaged in weighing up these unsavoury morsels into a certain quantity, which is supposed to equal the body. With this mass the coffin is filled and screwed down. When burying day comes – perhaps there are 10 or a dozen coffins’ full – round comes the hearse, and off go the ‘pieces’ – men, women, children, all mixed up together in glorious confusion – to the cemetery. Here the whole horrible business concludes with the Church of England burial service! The coffins are flimsy affairs, and one wonders what would happen if one broke at the graveside, and the clergyman saw, say, two mutilated heads, half-a-dozen feet, and three legs with a gory mass of scraps roll out? But ‘it’s only a pauper whom nobody owns.’”
Best Wishes
alex
|
Natalie Severn
Chief Inspector
Username: Severn
Post Number: 774
Registered: 11-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, May 02, 2004 - 10:50 am: | |
Thanks for that info Alan and Alex.
No wonder they were after medical students as suspects for Jack the Ripper if this was how medical students were encouraged to treat the bodies of destitute people!
Natalie |
Glenn L Andersson
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Glenna
Post Number: 1723
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, May 02, 2004 - 2:19 pm: | |
Howdy, Alex and Alan.
Thank you both.
All the best
Glenn Gustaf Lauritz Andersson
Crime historian, Sweden |
AP Wolf
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 1094
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, May 02, 2004 - 5:23 pm: | |
Dan
You ain’t about to get away with that!
Cannibalism marches alongside us as a society, always, depending of course on social or personal circumstance. For instance, if your aircraft happens to crash in the Andes and as a survivor you find yourself hard up for fodder then it is perfectly acceptable to gnaw on the bones of your best friend or wife. In fact they’ll write a book about you and make a film, it will not be called ‘The Killer of the Andes’, it will be called ‘The Hero of the Andes’.
Isn’t it funny how something as abhorrent as ‘cannibalism’ can become a perfectly acceptable means of survival when social or personal circumstances change?
Many times during periods of stress in society, individuals have resorted to such practise and this has been totally accepted by the majority of the society in which such events have taken place, for instance in the death camps of the second world war, or more famously in situations where sailors have been ship wrecked and taken to life boats for weeks at a time.
You see, there is a way, and a sure method to break down the essential taboo, and that is of course to make it acceptable due to unusual circumstance.
I would suggest to you that killing a fellow human being is unusual circumstance, and hence the consumption of the murdered individual becomes perfectly acceptable to him who holds the knife.
Magical transfer.
It is often our own view into a situation - or even a word - that alters that situation or word, most often to our liking, you like zeitgeist to mean what suits you, and I like zeitgeist to suit me, sir.
The public beating and rape of Jane Shore at a public fair in London - not long before the crimes of the Whitechapel Murderer - by a group of men while a crowd of men, women and children cheered them on is your zeitgeist… and mine.
It happened then, but because we have no rational or logical explanation to offer, it is still happening now. It is essentially a ghost that travels time and connects the ‘then’ and ‘now’.
What do you think would have been the reaction of the cheering crowd if after beating Jane and raping her in broad daylight, the men had then cut her up, grilled and eaten her?
I fear your PNG native is alive and well and stalking the streets of the East End as we speak.
Unusual social or personal circumstance allows for madness, murder and mutilation to be carried out wholesale to the applause of society, just as in the second world war when fellow human beings who did not fit a certain social class were slaughtered, dismembered and even on occasion eaten by their bed fellows.
Bloody slaughter, mutilation and then cannibalism does seem to be the favoured methods by which society disposes of unwanted classes or castes… such as whores.
But I do not believe that anyone, even a deranged serial killer, looks at somebody walking down the street and says ’Oh, I’d like to eat her kidney!’
It is something that seems to follow the unnatural death of a person in very close and personal circumstance, so I would say that it has absolutely nothing to do with the ’living’; so no power, no control, no lust, no domination, no sex, no nothing we know anything about because we haven’t done it.
You see you can’t have power, control, domination or sex with or over a dead person. By my reckoning it is a childish thing. Like a kid might stick his compass needle through a living frog’s head and then run his finger along the needle to see what the frog taste like. Frog taste bad.
Still alive though, so stick it again. Now’s it’s dead.
Goes home and has his fish fingers for his supper.
Frog forgotten.
Yeah, a kid, no complications there.
A kid with zeitgeist, if you like.
Not Jack the Yid, but Jack the Kid.
Billy the Kid?
Billy Liar?
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Glenn L Andersson
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Glenna
Post Number: 1724
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, May 02, 2004 - 5:52 pm: | |
Too much SSB again, AP (or too little)?
All the best
Glenn Gustaf Lauritz Andersson
Crime historian, Sweden |
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