Diary of Jack the Ripper Case Study

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Jack the Ripper

How do you feel that this case impacted the field of death investigation?

Ignoring things like DNA and other forensic tools that came about or came into their current focus nearly a century after the Jack the Ripper deaths, there is no doubt an impact to the field of death investigation. One major impact is that there is now a very engrained skepticism about anonymous letters of people claiming to be the killer and/or killings that have the basic look and feel of a supposed serial killer but are missing some of the details that are not publicly known and are thus actually not linkable to the prior killings that are known to be of the actual serial killer.

To that end, there is a much more entrenched and developed concept and field of profiling, looking for a consistent motive and "signature" from one killing to the next and actually being able to link the killings through DNA, footprints and pattern. For example, the partial kidney that surfaced during one of the Ripper murders could nowadays be linked to an actual victim provided there was a body or a known missing person to go with the kidney. Proving such a thing in the 1880's during the time of the Ripper would have been difficult to impossible depending on what all evidence was available and whether the kidney owner was known to be missing, which would have been much more unlikely back then. Tactics and technology that did not exist in the 1880's clearly show why there were only five murders that were definitively linked to the Ripper (Kelly, Stride, Chapman, Nichols and Eddowes) while the Whitechapel murders and other bodies were only theoretically linked to the Ripper, for the most part. The art of interviewing, canvassing and setting up a firm profile of a killer have all taken leaps and bounds since the time of the Ripper.

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2. What differences do you see in the techniques employed in the year 1888 and present day death investigation?

One major difference is preservation of the crime scene and/or the scene where the body is found (very often not the same place in many modern death investigations). Crime scenes are now scoured for anything with DNA (blood, semen, hair, etc.), fingerprints, boot prints, indentations on paper pads, computer records/internet search history, blood spatter patterns (ExploreForensics, 2013).

Another major way things have changed is through medical advancements vis-a-vis the analysis of bodies such as lividity, hemorrhaging in the eyes, and so forth that speak to the position of the body upon death, the position of the body when actually found, and so forth. Details like this tell the position of the body when death actually occurred, when certain traumas or causes of death occurred, whether the body was moved post-mortem, time of death and so on. Much of this was in its nascent stages (if it was used or usable at all) in the 1880's (ExploreForensics, 2013).

Of course, the pivotal difference is the advance or even creation of forensic and DNA technology since the 1880's. The databases, DNA samples and other records that are easily searchable would….....

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