BLOODY JACK Chapter Nineteen

I think the tipping point came on Monday, 1 October, 1888 when even the staid Times of London bowed to the pressures from their advertisers and customers. On that date the story went the 19^th century equivalent of “viral”  The Times story that day read, “In the early hours of Yesterday morning two more horrible murders were committed in the East of London... No doubt seems to be entertained by the police that these terrible crimes were the work of the same fiendish hands...”

“In the first mentioned case", said The Times,  "the body was found in a gateway, and although the murder...may be regarded as of almost ordinary character – the unfortunate woman only having her throat cut – (there is) little doubt...that the assassin intended to mutilate...The murder in the City...(had) indescribable mutilations...some anatomical skill seems to have been displayed...At Three O'clock yesterday afternoon a meeting of nearly a thousand persons took place in Victoria Park...a resolution was unanimously passed that it was high time (Home Secretary Henry Matthews and Scotland Yard head Charles Warren) should resign...”

The un-staid London Evening News was a little free-er with their facts. “On Sunday morning a woman was found with her throat cut and her body partially mutilated in a court in Berner street...the deed was done in the short period of twenty minutes...in the time which the police surgeon said a medical expert would take to do it...Having been disturbed in his first attempt...the murderer seems to have made his way towards the City, and to have met another "unfortunate”,...He...cut her throat...then proceeded to disembowel her. He must have been extremely quick at his work...the City beats being much shorter than those of the Metropolitan Police.”

The News editorialized, “Successive editions of the Sunday papers were getting a marvelous sale yesterday...The police yesterday afternoon took possession of Mitre-square and kept out the people... There was also a crowd of perhaps a couple of hundred persons outside the gateway in Berner-street during the day, and at ten o'clock last night there were perhaps 150 assembled in the roadway...”

The Evening News noted that on Monday, “A TERRIBLE PANIC has taken possession of the entire district, and its effects are to be seen in the wild, terrified faces of the women, and heard in the muttered imprecations of the men...WHERE WERE THE POLICE?...It seems incredible that, within the short space of twelve minutes, a man and woman should have entered the deserted precincts of Mitre-square, that the man should have murdered his victim, disemboweled her with the same unerring skill...and should have made his escape...He must, when he hurried away...have been reeking with blood”.

The News reporter noted the increased police presence at the murder scenes and suggested it reminded him of “the old adage about locking the stable door after the steed has been stolen.” He described the crowd in Berner Street as being made up of, “nearly all classes. Clubmen from the West-end rubbed shoulders with the grimy denizens of St. George's-in-the-East: daintily dressed ladies...elbowed their way amid knots of their less favored sisters, whose dirty and ragged apparel betokened the misery of their daily surroundings”

The London Evening News offered its readers one tidbit of real information - “The body found in Berner-street has been identified as that of Elizabeth Stride.” But then returned to building  hysteria “....the murder... grows bolder by impunity. One victim for one night was his former rule. He now...cuts off two within an hour...It is impossible to avoid the depressing conviction that the Police are about to fail once more, as they have failed with CHAPMAN, as they have failed with NICHOLLS, as they have failed with TABRAM... The Police have done nothing, they have thought of nothing, and in their detective capacity they have shown themselves distinctly inferior.”

The Irish Times knew just who to blame. “Sir CHARLES WARREN (above, right)...appears at last to understand that it will be fatal to men in his position if those murders are not traced.”  The Home Secretary, Henry Matthews (above, left), was described on the floor of Parliament as “helpless, heedless, useless”, and The Daily Telegraph urged his resignation. Many already suspected the conservative British government of Lord Salisbury was responsible for disinformation and dirty tricks political campaigns against Irish self government movement. They were right, but not knowing details of the Home Office's Irish Section – Section D – they could not know that Charles Warren had no responsibility over these political black ops. So he got the blame for it all.

Under a Monday evening column titled “What We Think”, The Star said the killer had again, “got away clear; and again the police...confess that they have not a clue. They are waiting for a seventh and an eighth murder, just as they waited for a fifth...Meanwhile, Whitechapel is half mad with fear. The people are afraid even to talk with a stranger.... It is the duty of journalists to keep their heads cool, and not inflame men's passions...” The "Star" then proceeded to do just that. “Two theories are suggested to us,” warned The Star a few sentences further down, “that he may wear woman's clothes, or may be a policeman.”

“The police, of course, are helpless,” continued The Star. “We expect nothing of them. The Metropolitan force is rotten to the core, and it is a mildly farcical comment on the hopeless unfitness of Sir CHARLES WARREN (above)...there must be an agitation against Sir CHARLES WARREN, who is now...detaching more men from regular police and detective duty to political work....”  But the Star did get one piece of information right. In that same Monday evening edition they mentioned, “After committing the second murder, the man seems to have gone back towards the scene of the former. An apron, which is thought by the police to belong to the woman found in Mitre-square, as it was the same material as part of her dress, was found in Goldstar Street. It was smeared with blood, and had been evidently carried away by the murderer to wipe his hands with.”

The Star's reporter returned to Berner Street in the afternoon and found that “Blue helmets were as thick as bees in a clover field...Prominent among those on the spot...was Superintendent Foster, of the City Police. He personally...paid a visit to the scene of the Berner street tragedy, to compare the two cases...As he came out of Berner street, a man in a tweed suit was seen walking by his side, and someone in the crowd shouted out: "There they go. The super's got him. I told you he was a toff." This silly remark was enough to turn the tide of attention in the direction of the officer and his companion ..their unsought retinue followed...till they met the tide from the other direction, and then the side streets swallowed up the surplus and the officials escaped.” 

That night another reporter for The Star saw, “little groups of ill-clad women standing under the glare of a street lamp or huddling in a doorway talking..."He'll be coming through the houses and pulling us out of our beds next," says one. "Not he," says another; "he's too clever for that."

On that same Monday, the Central News dropped a bombshell – the killer had written a letter, in red ink (above), and dated the previous Tuesday, 25 September. It read - in part - , "Dear Boss - I keep on hearing the police have caught me...I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me rare fits. I am down on whores, and I shan't quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now? I love my work...I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger-beer bottle...but it went thick like glue, and I can't use it. Red ink is fit enough, ha, ha, ha!...My knife is so nice and sharp, I want to get to work right away, if I get the chance. Good, cock, "Yours truly, JACK THE RIPPER."  There was a post script - “Don't mind me giving the trade name. Wasn't good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands, curse it. They say I'm a doctor. Ha! ha! ha! ha!"

So there it was – that iconic name – Jack the Ripper – its first appearance in print. And, added the Central News Service, that very morning they had received a post card, this written in red chalk, but smeared with blood. “"Double event this time," it read. "Number One squealed a bit...JACK THE RIPPER." Added the News Service, “..it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that the cool, calculating villain who is responsible for the crimes has chosen to ...convey to the Press his grimly diabolical humor.”

Neither missive was actually written by the killer, of course. The letter had been written mailed and received during the two week lull in the case, before the murders of 30 September. It was an attempt to keep the story going, to generate additional newspaper sales. And the post card was merely another ploy, feeding the horror machine which had become Jack the Ripper. On that same Monday, the News printed a letter from builder and self made man George Akin Lusk (above),  naming himself as Chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, and encouraging Home Secretary Matthews to offer a reward for the capture of the killer. Volunteers from the committee were already patrolling the streets and pubs of Whitechapel, which might explain why the killer had moved outside his usual hunting fields..

But the most important development from the the double event weekend was that at last, Jack the Ripper was a going financial concern. There would be legal, sociological and political effects of  Bloody Jack. But the murderer and his victims had become of secondary importance.

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BLOODY JACK Chapter Eighteen

I guess the kindest thing I can say about 36 year old Dr. Fredrick William Blackwell (above), is that he was awakened from a dead sleep by his assistant,  Edward Johnson,  not ten minutes before he examined the body outside the International Workers Educational Institute. By his own watch Dr. Blackwell arrived at the scene at 1:16 a.m., Sunday, 30 September, 1888. And he immediately went to work. But adrenalin can only get you so far, and I fear Dr. Blackwell was pushed faster and farther than he could handle.

He immediately recognized that the victim was dead – her head had been “nearly severed from her body” - and that she had been killed recently – by his first estimate “not more than 20 minutes” earlier, although he gets points for hedging that to up to 30 minutes to match the witness testimony. But that very night Dr. Blackwell also felt compelled to tell The London Star, “...it does not follow that the murderer would be be spattered with blood, for, as he is sufficiently cunning in other things, he could contrive to avoid coming in contact with the blood..."

So, from almost the instant the woman's body on Berner Street was found, it was assumed she was another victim of the clever madman responsible for the escalating murders of Martha Tabem, Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman. But the good doctor assumed a great deal more than that. He also told the Star, “The woman did not appear to be a Jewess, but more like an Irishwoman”  In fact her birth name was Elizabeth Gustafsdotter – she was Swedish – and had been known in London for twenty years as Elizabeth Stride (above). So much for racial profiling.

Dr. Blackwell's description of her wounds was interesting. “In the neck,” he told the inquest on Monday, “there was a long incision...(which) commenced on the left side, 2 inches below the angle of the jaw...nearly severing the vessels on that side, cutting the wind pipe...completely in two, and terminating on the opposite side 1 inch below the angle of the right jaw, but without severing the vessels on that side.” There were no wounds below the shoulders. By separating the windpipe, the killer silenced Elizabeth. By cutting only one side of her jugular veins and arteries he produced unconsciousness in 1- 3 minutes, with death shortly there after.  But even that was longer than the agony of previous victims.

So Liz Stride's neck had been cut from right to left in one stroke – not two - indicating the killer was either right handed or had attacked Elizabeth from behind. All three of those points strongly hint that Liz Stride had not been killed by the same man who had murdered the previous three women, who was probably left handed, and had cut the throat twice.. And this murder was committed outside a social club with two dozen people inside, and less than fifty feet from the small “The Lord Nelson” public house at 46 Berner Street, with people still coming and going to and from those two establishments. The victim on the unlit stairwell in Georg's Yard, the victim shielded by the fence of 29 Hanbury Street, and the dead woman left on the dark stretch of Buck's Row were all isolated places. The first goal of con men and premeditated killers is to isolate their victims. Liz Stride was not isolated.

But what truly defines a victim of Jack the Ripper was his method for killing. To quote from the “Case Book” – http://www.casebook.org/intro.html, - “The Whitechapel murderer and his victim stood facing each other. When she lifted her skirts, the...Ripper seized the women by their throats and strangled them until they were unconscious if not dead....The Ripper then lowered his victims...He cut the throats when the women were on the ground...The Ripper then committed the mutilations.” The first step, manual strangulation takes no more than 10 seconds to produce unconsciousness and silence. If the throat is not cut the victim recovers in a few moments. So the victims were chocked to render them compliant. Once on the ground they were then murdered, allowing the killer to feel safe before releasing his pent up rage on the reproductive organs. But, as the casebook points out, “No sign of intercourse was ever detected.”

There should have been lots of questions about who had murdered this woman.  And about ten minutes after Dr. Blackwell arrived on the scene, there was a brief ray of hope. Detective Inspector Edmund Reid (above), the man who had investigated Martha Tabem's death,  was back from vacation and he arrived on the scene about 1:30 a.m. 

This time the body stayed right where it was, until Dr. George Bagster Phillips (above),  the Whitechapel Division Police Surgeon, arrived 15 minutes later. At last a doctor could compare a previous victim's condition and wounds with the latest victim's.

Inspector Reid was already interviewing the 28 people in the Educational Institute. Each had to give their name and address, a full account of what and who they saw that night, and a rough time line for the evening. And they were all forced to turn out their pockets. Houses on both sides of Berner Street were searched. All the residents were interviewed. This took time, and it was not until about 4:30 a.m. that Inspector Reid returned to the scene of the murder in Duitfield's Yard.

By now a large moribund crowd had gathered outside the closed gates, talking about the murders, inventing and spreading rumors. They were forced to part so the ambulance cart carrying the body could be wheeled away. Dr. Phillips had already left, and about 5:00am, Inspector Reid  returned to the Leman Street station, to begin writing up his report. It was about 5:30 that morning, when PC Collins oversaw the washing down of the murder scene. All the blood spatter was scrubbed off the walls and the pooled blood was washed into the gutter, along with anything the victim and killer might have dropped. So much for hope.

This time the body did not go to the Montague Street mortuary, to be “mishandled” by the Workhouse inmates. Instead the as yet unidentified body was loaded on a police ambulance cart and pushed south to...

...the Ratcliff Street Chapel and Mortuary in the south east corner behind the the Baroque St. George in the East Church (above), on Cannon Street south of Cable Street in Wapping   Just two blocks north of the Tobacco Docks, the mortuary was a small utilitarian brick building, built in 1876, to give the working poor a choice over keeping the decaying corpse of a deceased loved one at home - usually in one of those 8' by 8' rooms – until they could afford a grave and funeral.

Because of the public fear of grave-robbers, these chapel mortuaries were under-used. And in truth, before refrigeration, they had no better facilities than the Montague Street mortuary. But the workhouse inmates were convenient scapegoats for the officials' failure to catch the murderer. And the events on that Sunday morning, 30 September, 1888, on Berner Street, and in the dark corners of Mitre Square 45 minutes later, would increase the pressure on the police and the doctors who worked with them.

It was respected Police Constable Edward Watkins who discovered the second horror of that night. He was a 17 year veteran of the London Police Force – separate from the Metropolitan force, so the government would always have direct authority over the governmental and banking centers. The City of London ended where the city walls once stood, and Constable Watkin's beat was near the eastern edge, within sight at Aldgate. 

He started in Duke Street (above, left) where it joined St. James Place, aka Gowers Walk. Walking at the prescribed 2 ½ miles an hour he headed through Heneage Lane to Bury Street, Creechurch Lane, down Leadenhall Street to Mitre Street and Mitre Square, then to King Street to Gowers Street back to Duke Street. Each round was carefully timed out and took 14 to 16 minutes to complete.

Just about 1:45 that chilly Sunday morning, PC Watkins entered the “small and dirty” cobblestone Mitre Square for the 15^th time that night. The square had only two gas lights (X's above) -  and one of of those was weak And it had two exits.

 On the north west corner of the square (above), between two Kearley and Tongue warehouses, was  a narrow covered passage to St. James Place and King Street.  

The second exit was Church Lane,  on the northeastern corner of Mitre Square, between the Horner and Company warehouse and a larger K and T warehouse. Church Lane connected with Duke Street, next to the Great Synagogue.. 

Because those two corners had lights, Constable Watkins entered the square (above) and turned right, into the darkest corner of Mitre Square. 

He walked east past the rear of a framing  shop and three abandoned buildings (above)

He was now facing the closed wooden gate of Heydemann & Company warehouse, the darkest corner of the square, and it was here that his bulls eye lantern threw its light upon the body of a woman lying on her back, where the curb met the cobbles. And she had not been there 15 minutes earlier, when Constable Watkins last stood here.

“The clothes were pushed up to her breast, and the stomach was laid bare,” Watkins testified, “with a dreadful gash from the pit of the stomach to the breast. 

"On examining the body I found the entrails cut and laid around the throat, which had an awful gash in it, extending ear to ear. In fact the head was nearly severed from the body. Blood was everywhere to be seen." 

And there was something new, a new injury. "It was difficult to discern the injuries to the face for the quantity of blood which covered it...the murderer had inserted the knife just under the left eye, and drawing it under it under the nose, cut the nose completely from the face, at the same time inflicting a dreadful gash down the right cheek to the angle of the jawbone. The nose was laid over on the cheek. A more dreadful sight I never saw. It quite knocked me over.”

And this barbarous murder, together with the earlier murder on Bernier Street,  had the same effect upon the entire city of London.

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BLOODY JACK Chapter Seventeen

 

I believe the first challenge to Dr. George B. Phillips' opinions about the murder of Annie Chapman appeared when the inquest reconvened on Wednesday, 12 September, 1888. The first witness was John Richardson, eldest son of Mrs. Amelia Richardson. Between 4:45 am and 4:50 am on Saturday, 8 September, before reporting to his job as a porter at the Spitafields market, 

John stopped by his mother's residence at 29 Hanbury Street (above) to check on her basement workshop, from which tools had been stolen weeks earlier. The first light of dawn had appeared just after 4:50 that morning - sunrise would be at 5:23 am. And standing on the threshold of the back door, John could clearly see the padlock on the basement door six feet away was still snapped shut, and the door secure. He did not need to move closer. But then John did something crucial.

He sat on the top step, with his feet resting in the yard, and struggled to cut some leather off his shoes, which were crimping his toes. He sat on the step, John estimated, for “two minutes at most”. But it was a crucial two minutes. It was light enough, John said, that he could see the entire back yard clearly. And with his head down, he could certainly see 6 inches.

He insisted, “I could not have failed to notice the deceased had she been lying there, then.” And if she was not there, then - within 6 inches of John Richardson - then Dr. Phillips was wrong when he said Dark Annie died between 3:30 and 4:30 that morning,

John's mother, Amelia Richardson, then testified that the leather apron found in the back yard belonged to her younger son. She had washed it under the backyard tap on Thursday and left out to dry. It was still lying there on Saturday morning, and had nothing to do with the murder, despite lurid press reports the killer had left it behind.. This supported the next witness, John Pizer, a shoemaker from Mulberry Street. 

He'd been arrested for his own safety by Detective Inspector Sargent William Thicke (above)  – who earned his nickname when a prostitute greeted him, "“Why fuck me, if it isn't Johnny Upright!”. The terrified cobbler was well known about Whitechapel as “Leather Apron”, and he was  known for threatening the prostitutes he frequented by telling them, "I'll rip you".  But after following him for days the police had cleared Mr. Pizer. And D.I. "Johnny Upright" Thicke had brought Pizer before the jury to discourage the vigilante street gangs which had been threatening to cut his throat. The jury heard no testimony about John Pizer's predilections, instead only recorded his attempt to “vindicate my character to the world at large”  With that public service out of the way, the inquest moved on to what did happen on the morning of 8 September, 1888. 

As the clock atop the Black Eagle Brewery struck 5:30 a.m. - 7 minutes after sunrise - Mrs. Elizabeth Long was walking south on Brick Lane. She then turned west on Hanbury Street, heading to the Spitsfield Market, on Commercial Street. Just before reaching Number 29 Hanbury,  Elizabeth passed a man and woman in loud conversation on the building side of the sidewalk (above). They were facing each other and Mrs. Long had a good look at the woman's face.  After viewing the body in the morgue, Elizabeth had positively identified her as Annie Chapman.

The man had his back to Mrs. Long, but she described him as not much more than 5 feet tall (Annie Chapman was just 5 feet), about 40 years old, wearing a dark overcoat and a brown deerstalker hat. He was, she thought,  foreign looking with a dark complexion and a “shabby genteel” appearance. She distinctly heard the man say -  in a “foreign accent” -  “Will you?” To which she heard Dark Annie respond, “Yes.” Elizabeth took little notice of the two. Later, when news of the murder spread like wildfire through the market, Elizabeth Long realized what she had seen and heard might be important

That same morning, carpenter Albert Cadoche was hurrying to the privy in the back yard of 27 Hanbury Street. He was suffering from a a urinary tract infection, and a few painful moments later he was returning to the building's back door when he distinctly heard a woman say, “No”. Albert also took little notice, and was not even certain which direction the voice had come from. But UTI's being what they are,  within a few minutes Albert was making the same round trip again. This time, on his way to the outhouse, he heard something thud against the 5 foot high fence dividing the back yard of number 27 from the yard of number 29. 

A few moments later, as Albert was walking down Fournier street (above), he saw the clock atop the Christ's Church Spitafields tower (below). He said it read 5:32 am. 

The times did not match up perfectly, but if Elizabeth Long did see Annie Chapman and her killer reaching a business arraignment closer to 5:15 a.m....And if Albert Cadoche heard the thud against the fence about 5:25 a.m....And if the Christ's Church clock (above) actually read closer to 5:42 a.m...Then Annie Chapman died about 5:30 a.m.. And that would have left the murderer 15 to 20 minutes to mutilate the body and leave the house with his bloody trophy before John Davis discovered the dead woman. Could both these witnesses be that far off in their timing?

Before the second half of the 20^th century all clocks were mechanical, and effected by wear, temperature, humidity, maintenance, and their purpose. The clock in the Spitafields Church was a call to prayer. The Black Eagle Brewery clock (above, right)  was designed to make the name ubiquitous in Whitechapel. Neither clock was meant to be accurate, in the modern meaning of that word. And the witnesses did not carry their own watches. The important thing about all three stories is not the exact time they occurred, but the place in which they occurred.

The back yard of 29 Hanbury Street (above) was empty when John Richardson left about 5 or 10 minutes before 5:00 a.m.  While he was there Annie Chapman was still alive - at least half an hour after Dr. Phillips said she must already be dead.  But she must have been within half a mile of the spot, because she was found there,  dead, just before 6:00 am. And...

...either the killer left the yard by climbing over the 5 foot high fence and then running between yards (above)  – odd enough behavior to attract attention in a crime ridden area...or, the strangler walked out the front door, something which would attract no more notice at Number 29 Hanbury Street then a figure sleeping on the stairs of a building in George Yard.

So it is likely Annie Chapman entered the backyard of number 29 Hanbury Street (above) between 5:00 am and 5:30 am - which roughly supports both John Richardson's and Elizabeth Long's stories. Dark Annie was found dead in the yard between 5:30 and 6:00 am, which roughly fits Albert Cadoche's time line. But none of the witnesses support Dr. Phillip's estimate.

Coroner Wayne Baxter (above) would later say at the inquest, “It is true that Dr. Phillips thinks that when he saw the body at 6.30  the deceased had been dead at least two hours, but he admits that the coldness of the morning and the great loss of blood may affect his opinion; and if the evidence of the other witnesses be correct, Dr. Phillips has miscalculated the effect of those forces...”  In fact, the good doctor had been recalled on Wednesday, 19 September. He was pressed to provide more details about the mutilations, and resisted until all women and children had left the room – children? At a grisly murder inquest? And did the Victorian doctor think women were unaware of the existence of such organs within their own bodies?

It is understandable  that Dr. George Phillips (above) might be trying to protect evidence only the killer would know, but the jury wanted to know, and Dr. Phillips was forced to reply. 

The details of the cuts to the vagina and bladder went on the record - and in the newspapers.  But he was able to protect that the womb had been removed, saying only, “One of the organs was entirely absent from the body”.  And then Dr. Phillips added, “The appearance of the cut surfaces indicated that the instrument used must have been very sharp, and showed a certain amount of anatomical knowledge.”

Combined with his testimony of Monday, 10 September (above) - “Obviously the work was that of an expert...” - and his belief the weapon was “...a doctor's knife, or the kind of knife used in a slaughter house or by a butcher”,  makes Dr. Phillips the  “ad fontem” - the original source - of Jack the Ripper as a professional man, someone – pardon the expression – a cut above the mass of Whitechapel's uneducated working poor.

And from this bit of Victorian bias was born the century long industry of the killer as a doctor, an actor, a painter, an intellectual, a detective or even a member of royalty. It made a lot of money for a lot of people, most as yet unborn in 1888.  But it disguised the killer who moved about Whitechapel as only a resident of Whitechapel could - unseen because he was unremarkable in that time and place.

And Dr. Phillips offered yet another misdirection to the mystery. When asked by Coroner Wayne Baxter how long it would have taken to have performed the mutilations, Dr. Phillips said, “I myself could not have performed all the injuries I saw on that woman, even without a struggle, under a quarter of an hour.  If I had done it in the deliberate manner usual with a surgeon, it would probably have taken me the best part of an hour." ”

It added to the mystery. It enforced the image of the killer as a calculating fiend. It insisted the mutilations had taken considerable time. But was it not more likely the killer, as a child,  had experimented on small animals? Then he would not be a doctor fiend, or a slaughterhouse mad man, but rather just a mad man, what modern criminology would call a disorganized serial killer,  who left his psychological diagnosis on display at the murder scene.

At the final session of the inquest into the death of the second victim, Polly Nichols...and after 4 days of testimony in the still open inquest of Annie Chapman's murder....and with the case of Martha Tabaum still unsolved, Coroner Baxter seemed to sense the horror that was yet  to come.  “I suggest,” he told the jury in the Nichol's case , “...these... women may have been murdered by the same man with the same object...and having failed in the open street he tries again, within a week...in a more secluded place....the audacity and daring is equal to its maniacal fanaticism and abhorrent wickedness...but one thing is very clear - that a murder of a most atrocious character has been committed.” 

And would be committed again, and again, and again.

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