While researching my next article, I came across this insightful quote. It comes from Wichita homicide investigator Ken Landwehr, the man who headed up the effort to capture the BTK Strangler, and who ultimately succeeded. It’s no easy task solving any murder, but serial murder is perhaps the hardest of all to solve. So when someone like that offers advice, it’s usually worth one’s time to listen to him. While he is speaking to a fellow detective on how to approach solving the BTK case, I believe his insights can be applied, usefully, to Ripperology as well.
“Here’s where detectives get themselves lost,” Landwehr told Relph the day they first talked about BTK. “They get lost on some guy’s story. A guy looks good as a suspect; if you have maybe twelve criteria for being the right guy for a crime, and this guy meets ten of the twelve, then he’s looking good. And so the detective gets enthralled, chases his story – and goes off on a tangent, a wild goose chase. Because if the guy’s DNA doesn’t match the DNA from the crime, it’s not him. And then you have to drop him like a rock.”
Relph began to apply this advice while reading about BTK and working on other cases.
“How do you not get lost in all these thousands of pages of evidence,?” Relph asked.
“Don’t try to get into all that peripheral evidence,” Landwehr said. “Just read the actual case files. Focus on the essentials.”
(Wenzel, Potter, Kelly and Laviana, “Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of the Serial Killer Next Door,” HarperCollins, p. 145, 2007.)
Although DNA is not a useful reference in the Ripper killings, the rest of Landwehr’s insights could help dispense with a lot of wasted effort in the field of Ripperology, I believe. How often to authors and researchers get so caught up in the story of a suspect, they begin to ignore the evidence in the Ripper crimes that does not support the conclusion that their pet suspect was the Ripper? More often than most of us would like to believe; it’s a common mistake of most suspect-oriented books in this field.
Also, many Ripper researchers similarly fall into the other pitfall Landwehr warns against: obsessing over the peripheral evidence. It’s often hard to know what peripheral evidence is relevant and what peripheral evidence is not, but it can serve as a great distraction. The best way to approach the Ripper case, then, is to stay focused on the essentials and the case files (such as they survive to this day.)
Good advice from a fellow who actually led a successful effort to capture a serial who nearly got away with it, like our man Jack did. Words we in the field of Ripperology might all do well to heed in our own research and writing.
