What could have been the motive for these savage murders? Whatever it was, I suggest that the same motive for this type of crime is still around today. At a cursory glance, the murders seem to be lacking motive. The victims, for a start, were prostitutes, belonging to the lowest and most poverty -struck areas of Victorian society. They lived on a day-to-day basis, many soliciting just to survive. The East End was a slum and, during that time, life was incredibly tough and ruthless.
Indeed, the Whitechapel murders have been widely considered to be the work of a serial killer and it is accepted that most serial killers do not have a motive in the usual sense. They do not murder out of jealousy, revenge or greed. They murder because they have an overpowering desire to do so. They get a thrill, often sexual, out of murder and mutilation.
The killer – assuming for the moment that just one was responsible – left no evidence of sexual assault other than the fact that some of the victims were found with their clothes pushed back above the waist. There is no record of seminal fluid having been found in any of the victims, although it must be said that the doctors seem not to have addressed this question in their examinations. But all the victims appear to have gone to the murder locations for some purpose. Could it have been for sex? All were prostitutes, after all. Yet, when found, hardly any of them had a penny to their name. I doubt a single one of them would have gone to the murder location with anyone unless she had been paid in advance or the person propositioning her was a man of wealth who had shown her he had more than enough money to pay her after any sexual act. If the killer had paid in advance, I am sure he would have taken his money back after the killing.
So what motive could the killer have had for committing these murders? Could he have had a hatred of women, maybe dating back to his childhood or adolescence? Perhaps he was abused by his mother and father, or even given away or abandoned. Could he have held his mother responsible for something that had happened to him in later years?
Was he motivated by the desire specifically to kill prostitutes? All his victims were prostitutes. Did he form a hatred of such women because he had caught a disease from one, and, if it was syphilis, was his condition perhaps so far advanced that it was driving him insane. Was the killer what we would describe today as a psychopath? Had he developed a deranged lust for killing? Did he, like the schizophrenic serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, hear voices telling him to rid the streets of prostitutes?
Some researchers today suggest the killings were ritualistic, because the murder sites form a pentagram. Over the years stories have circulated about items, rings, coins and other items being placed ‘ritually’ at the feet of Annie Chapman, but this was an invention of the press. Other theories regard the placing of the organs and the cuts made to the faces of some of the victims as part of a ritual of some kind. There are many possibilities, but, on the face of it, the murders do not seem to display any ritualistic pattern.
Was the motive connected with some form of Masonic initiation rite? This suggestion has been with us for many years. I will cover the reasons for its persistence later, when I discuss the suspects. However, this idea of Masonic involvement goes back to the Old Testament, to the murder of King Solomon’s grand Masonic master, Hiram Abiff. The offenders were brought to justice and Solomon had their throats cut and their intestines cut out and thrown over their left shoulders. Unfortunately for those who wish to draw a parallel, both Chapman’s and Eddowes’s intestines were found on their right shoulders.
After all this time the question of motive remains unanswered. Many, both at the time and still today, have believed that the killer could have been a local resident who held a menial job that allowed him enough freedom to move about more or less as he pleased. But consider the days on which the killings took place. These were mainly weekends, which suggests a weekday routine of employment.
Whoever the killer was, he clearly had a hatred of women, and the crimes were sexual in nature inasmuch as he attacked reproductive organs. In the murders, the killer showed signs of what are known by practitioners of criminal profiling as organised and disorganised characteristics. Time and time again he escaped detection and capture. Also, he was apparently capable of gaining the trust of his victims. Both these abilities suggest an organised offender. On the other hand, the risks he took with his choice of some of the crime scenes and the state in which he left the victims both suggest a disorganised offender, although one who, in my view, was cool and calculated.
If, as I suggested earlier, the murders could have been committed by several different people, we could have one serial killer plus several separate killers not connected to one another. If that is the case, it is likely that there were separate motives for the different murders.