The Suffolk Murders

As anyone who has read any sort of news website online or any form of the Dead Tree Press must know, Ipswich seems to have a serial killer. Obviously our media is known throughout the world for being subtle, sensitive and in no way whatsoever sensationalist or lurid, so the coverage of the Ipswich Ripper has been even-handed and not like watching a car crash happen in gory detail at all. Actually, it would take me far too long to pull apart the terrible articles I have read over the past few weeks but a few points do spring to mind:

1. This killer, whilst obviously a disturbed and evil person, is not a Ripper. That is a lazy, journalistic shorthand based around the fact that he kills prostitutes - like Peter Sutcliffe and Jack the Ripper. Now the term Ripper was coined by Jack The Ripper, who slit the throats of prostitutes and cutting their corpses. In one of his letters to the police he describes his own activites as "ripping". Sutcliffe gained the nickname Ripper because he too killed prostitutes and brutally slashed their corpses. It is true that the police are almost certainly keeping some facts to themselves to elminate the cranks who falsely confess to these slayings, but there is not evidence that he is mutilating the corpses. In fact, one of the key phrases used in media reports is "the cause of death is undetermined". Now, if the police were confronted by one of Sutcliffe's victims, they would perhaps not know what had killed her stright away, but they would probably be able to guess that it would either be the hammer blows to the head or the knife wounds to the body. The fact that post-mortems have not always revealed the cause of death in the Ipswich murders indicates that these are very different to previous "Ripper" murders. As evil and incomprehensible as these crimes are they do not appear to be anywhere near as brutal and savage as Sutcliffe's killing.

2. There is no evidence the Suffolk Murderer hates prostitutes. It is difficult to understand exactly why he is doing what he is doing given he is still a free man, and it may yet become clear that he does have a serious issue with prostitutes, but this is an assumption. Unlike Sutcliffe he does not hack at their corpses. In fact, owing to the lack of defensive wounds and obvious signs of restraint, it would appear that the girls see no reason to fight him. This would fit in with the speculation about the use of drugs - he drugs them, and then does whatever he feels he needs to do. These don't appear to be angry crimes, and the lack of mutilation of the corpses or obvious sadistic attacks on the girls would indicate that he is not killing because of hate. Whilst he does kill them, he seems to be tring to ensure that their murders are as painless as possible.

3. I do not think that there is any reason, based on these murders, to legalise heroin or prostitution. Heroin is a highly addictive drug, and legalising it would not stop women (and men, I would imagine) from walking the streets. Legalised heroin would mean that more people have access to the drug, meaning there is more chance for people to become addicted. And as more people get addicted, they will look for increasingly desperate ways to fund their drug habits. So, just as the drunk/alcoholic steals to fund a drink problem, so people would turn to prostitution to fund their heroin problems. The only difference would be that this would now be a legal addiction, which would make fuck all difference when someone is having to open their legs for some punter somewhere to pay for skag. Likewise, legalising (or at least regulating) prostitution probably wouldn't have helped these girls. One of the key requirements for legal prositution would be drug free prostitutes, meaning these girls would have been forced away from legal prostitution and back into the street-walking netherworld. With the clients who are too aberrant or mal-adjusted to be with the legal prostitutes. There are cases to be made for both the legalisation of drugs and prostitution, but not against the back-drop of these tragic killings.

4. The psychological profiles appearing in the press are total shite. Let me give you my profile of the killer: he will be a white male, between 25 and 45. He will have above average intelligence but has never realised his potential. He probably won't have gone to university and will have a low paid, menial job. He will be seen as an under-achiever and if he has a relationship with a woman, it will most likely to be a celibate one. He may be impotent and if not, will have various sexual deviances and may only be able to achieve arousal with an unconcious woman. He will be known to the police already, most likely for a minor sexual offence or for a failed attack or for being a regular in the red light district. And you know how I know all this? Well, I just described Peter Sutcliffe. Or Dennis Nielsen. Or Fred West. Or countless other male serial murderers. All these profiles appearing on the press are examples of cold reading, and have all the scientific validity of a cheap psychic or other circus performer. The police are probably using a criminal profiler, but this profiler will have access to all elements of the case (not just the drips and drabs of information appearing in the press). And the police will also treat the profile as a tool, not as the be all and end all of their investigations. The chances are that the Suffolk Murderer will be caught by a policeman patrolling ther redlight district, or based on CCTV footage. Cracker and Millenium might be entertaining, but they are fiction. The reality of the police work is in the detail, and the analogy of a net slowly closing in on the killer is the good one. The investigation will narrow in on the right person, and then one detail will give the police the evidence they need to make an arrest.

I hope the police catch the killer very soon and I really hope he does not get the chance to kill again. I feel for the families who have lost some one - I know the girls were drug addicts and prostitutes, but whilst they lived there was hope for their families that, against the odds, everything might turn out alright. The killer has robbed them of that hope in an effort to fulfill his perverted desires. But I am convinced that the lurid, ignorant and unpleasant journalism that has surrounded this case has done nothing to help this case other than provide needless speculation and hype for their readers.