Free The Cases That Haunt Us by John Douglas, Mark Olshaker Page A

writing, most likely an uneducated immigrant, who is writing it the way he hears it.
    That the letter was sent not to the police, not to the press, but to a local ad hoc community leader is also significant, because I believe strongly that this type of disorganized offender is going to be operating only within his own circumscribed zone of comfort. This is a concept we’ll develop in more detail shortly.
    It’s also not beyond the realm of possibility that a disorganized offender who, we’ve already established, has a perverse sense of curiosity about the inside of the human body, might try to satisfy that curiosity by eating some of it. And as to the closing salutation, “Catch me when you can,” that can have two meanings. One would be an obvious taunt to the police from someone who has found that he can repeatedly get away with murder. The other would be a cry for help, similar to the “For heAVens Sake cAtch Me BeFore I Kill More I cannot control myselF” message scrawled on a wall by Chicago murderer William Heirens with his victim’s lipstick. One of Heirens’s other victims, a six-year-old girl, was found cut up in pieces in a suburban sewer.
    Could I be mistaken about the authenticity of the Lusk letter? Sure. A lot of the experts disagree with me. But what I can say is that unlike the communications that came before it, this one is consistent with what I would expect from the type of UNSUB I suspect Jack the Ripper to have been.

PROACTIVE IDEAS
    There was much speculation about the best way to catch this elusive and unprecedented killer, some of it from ordinary citizens, some from “experts.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose first Sherlock Holmes novel,
A Study in Scarlet
, had been published the previous year, speculated that the killer might be a man disguised as a woman. A midwife walking around Whitechapel in the early-morning hours with a bloody apron would arouse little suspicion.
    A few years later, in 1894, Conan Doyle suggested to an interviewer how Holmes would have attempted to crack the case. One of his techniques would have been to reproduce the “Dear Boss” letter and invite the public to respond. This is a highly legitimate proactive technique, which Special Agent Jana Monroe of my unit used successfully in the Rogers murder case in Florida when a billboard reproduction of the killer’s handwriting led to a swift ID. To give the Metropolitan Police their due, however, they did reproduce the “Dear Boss” letter on posters that were placed throughout the East End, but the technique came to nothing. As I don’t believe the letter to be authentic, I’m not surprised.
    One newspaper reader, as described by Donald Rumbelow in his landmark
Jack the Ripper: The Complete Casebook
, suggested in a letter that police search the “Saucy Jacky” postcard; since “no two persons’ thumbs are alike, the impression of one suspected person’s thumb should be taken and microscopically examined.” Rumbelow reports that the letter was filed away and that it would be seventeen years before the first fingerprint conviction.
    When the press began circulating the idea that the killer could be a depraved doctor or medical student, Rumbelow writes how one person suggested placing the following advertisement in newspapers the Ripper might see:
Medical Man or Assistant Wanted in London, aged between 25 and 40. Must not object to assist in occasional post mortem. Liberal terms.
    Although I do not believe the Ripper to have been a medical man, he certainly had the curiosity, and this is the kind of ploy that might just have brought him out.
    Dr. Forbes Winslow, a flamboyant physician and amateur detective who believed the killer to be a homicidal maniac goaded on by a religious mania, suggested having wardens from lunatic asylums patrolling with the police since they would be much more likely to recognize such tendencies in an individual. He also proposed a newspaper advertisement reading:
A gentleman who