The face of evil - psychotic murderers; includes related article - Cover Story

National Review, Jan 23, 1995 by Eugene H. Methvin

Nothing happened in October or in the first week of November. Then, on the morning of November 9, police were called to a dingy apartment off Miller's Court, again in Whitechapel. Mary Jane Kelly was the last known victim of Jack the Ripper, and no one who saw the scene of the crime, soaked with blood and strewn with viscera, was ever able to forget it.

Of all the suspects paraded before us by the various Ripper authors, including Mr. Sugden, none would need Perry Mason to get an acquittal on the evidence as it stands. For some years the front-runner was a barrister and schoolmaster named Montague John Druitt, who committed suicide shortly after the Miller's Court murder. He was favored by a senior Scotland Yard man, Sir Melville Macnagten, mainly, it appears, because Druitt's family suspected him. We don't know why.

RECENT research points to a Polish Jew named Aaron Kosminski. He was identified by a witness who had seen a man with one of the victims a few minutes before her murder. Yet the witness would not give evidence in court. The trouble with Kosminski is that he did not come to police attention until February 1891, more than two years after the last murder took place. Kosminski was incarcerated in Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. Later he was taken to another asylum, where he died in 1919.

Because of the continuing mystery about the killer's identity, a darkly glamorous legend has flourished. Lurking in a dim corner of the public imagination with his top hat, cloak, and Gladstone bag, walking silently at night through the swirling fog of Victorian London, Jack the Ripper has only a tenuous connection with the Whitechapel murderer. He is more a Gothic monster than a real person; it's no coincidence that the popular fascination with the Ripper coincides with a boom in Gothic horror. It would all come to an end if he could be identified and found to be as boring and mediocre as most killers are.

Often a killer's victims fit a particular pattern: migrant farm workers, elderly women at home alone, street-walking prostitutes, adolescent boys, black children, attractive young women who part their hair in the middle, hitchhiking co-eds. Sometimes they fit no pattern at all. The phenomenon is worldwide, from England's Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, who killed 13 women before his apprehension in 1981, to the Rostov Cannibal, Andrei Chikatilo, who slaughtered at least 53 young men and women in Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan over a dozen years before his arrest in 1990.

By one count, the U.S. has seen more than 150 documented cases of serial killers since 1800. John Douglas, a senior FBI analyst, estimates thirty to fifty serial killers are active in the U.S. at any one time. Any city large enough to have significant prostitution, a drug culture, "street people," and runaway kids is a hospitable locale, but so are quiet, semi-rural and exurban areas.

Ohio's Hunter of Humans illustrates the difficulty of catching serial killers. Modern mobility enables a serial killer to move easily from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and makes it difficult for police to recognize connections among deaths. Police often lack the sophisticated organization and computer systems that would help identify the problem while it is happening. In many places, detectives still use a primitive pin map showing the locations of all the homicides in the city.