UBC: Gordon, The Thames Torso Murders of Victorian London

[truepenny]

The Thames Torso Murders of Victorian London by R. Michael Gordon

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

There are only two books about the Thames Torso Murders. I have both of them. (The other, The Thames Torso Murders by M. J. Trow is actually quite good & I recommend it.) They do not agree on how many torso murders there were, when they started, or when they stopped. Which makes it difficult to get a grip on the subject at all. Trow discusses women's torsos & other body parts found in or near the Thames in 1873, 1874, 1884, 1887, 1888, and 1889. Gordon discusses women's torsos and other body parts found in or near the Thames in 1887, 1888, 1889, and 1902. Trow has no particular theory to flog, and I think he leaves out the 1902 murder because she doesn't really fit with the others (she was dismembered, yes, and found near the Thames, yes, but she was also cooked and--perhaps the most signal difference between her and the others in Gordon's series--they found her head with the rest of her).

Gordon does have a theory, and in a subset of historical criminology that abounds with stupid theories, this is honestly one of the stupidest. Gordon is trying, ineffectually, to argue that the Thames Torso Murderer and Jack the Ripper were (a) the same person and (b) George Chapman, he who was convicted and hanged for slowly poisoning three common-law wives to death with antimony.

Gordon argues that it's too coincidental for the East End of London to be home to three serial killers at the same time, but I find that less implausible than that George Chapman, who murdered by slow poison and with definite Munchausen's by Proxy overtones, is also Jack the Ripper, who strangled and mutilated prostitutes, and also the Thames Torso Murderer, who murdered women in some unknown fashion, dismembered them, and disposed of their bodies with such skill that only one of his victims was ever identified. It's true that serial killers can change their M.O. as needed, but if I've understood the idea of the signature correctly, Chapman, the Ripper and the TTM all murdered for quite different reasons and thus with quite different signatures. A man who murdered the way Chapman did wouldn't murder the way the Ripper did, and neither Chapman nor the Ripper dismembered corpses the way the TTM did. (And that may have been pure practicality and not a signature at all. The one intelligent idea in this book is that the Thames Torso Murders may not have been the work of a serial killer in the strict sense; they may have been the work of a backstreet abortionist or abortionists who had to dispose of the body when an abortion went wrong. And even that idea has some major stumbling blocks.) In each series, the thing that is superfluous to the murder--the thing that therefore is what the killer needs--is different. (And there isn't a meta element as there is in the inevitable comparison, the Zodiac Killer: you can argue that the Zodiac Killer's signature was actually his need to feel superior to the police.) And it is nonsense to ask, as Gordon does, "are we really dealing with two men, or are these the manifestations of a demented split personality--both of which happen to be serial killers?" (166). Absolute fucking nonsense. While Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (which Gordon uses as a template) is allegorically a brilliant discussion of hypocrisy and of the idea of the shadow self, it is not how actual psychology works. It is especially not how sociopathy works (an argument that Patricia Cornwell also tries to make, in another very stupid book about Jack the Ripper), nor how Dissociative Identity Disorder (if that's what he means by "a demented split personality") works.

On top of this dreadful, ludicrous thesis, Gordon is a bad writer on the sentence level, has no idea how to put together an argument, and cannot even put facts together into a comprehensible narrative. He is under the mistaken impression that rhetorical questions are an actual tool of argumentation. Asking the question in such a way that the desired answer is obvious does not make the desired answer the correct one.

Gordon is sloppy and wrong both about his background material (Burke & Hare) and about his actual subject matter (at one point he conflates Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman). He speculates irresponsibly, wildly, and with a kind of willfully blind stupidity that I find infuriating.

And OH MY FUCKING GOD this book was copy-edited by wolves. Drunk wolves. Drunk giggling wolves. An incomplete list of mistakes includes:

"formally" for "formerly"
"complimentary" for "complementary"
"course" for "coarse"
"mantel" for "mantle"

I read this book because (a) I am a completist and (b) the Thames Torso Murderer is relevant to one of the books I'm working on. I'm not sure either reason was sufficient.



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Comments

[sovay]

(And that may have been pure practicality and not a signature at all. The one intelligent idea in this book is that the Thames Torso Murders may not have been the work of a serial killer in the strict sense; they may have been the work of a backstreet abortionist or abortionists who had to dispose of the body when an abortion went wrong. And even that idea has some major stumbling blocks.)

May I ask?

[anne]

+1.

[truepenny]

I find it hard to believe that between 1874 and 1889, there were only seven botched abortions in the London metropolitan area. Clearly abortionists had other ways of disposing of bodies as necessary, which leads one back around to it being the same person botching these seven abortions, and then you start wondering what the line is here between a person who kills multiple times by accident and disposes of the bodies in this extremely particular way . . . and a serial killer.

[larryhammer]

He is under the mistaken impression that rhetorical questions are an actual tool of argumentation.

Arggggggh. I especially hate that kind of fallacy. It drives me buggy to the point I have a hard time putting together coherent rejoinders.