From Whitechapel To Behavioural Evidence: What Forensic Profiling Can—And Cannot— Infer About Jack The Ripper

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Ishaan D. Joshi, Consulting Forensic and Criminal Intelligence Expert, Visiting Faculty, MIT-WPU School of Law

ABSTRACT

The Jack the Ripper case remains a foundational reference point in criminal psychology because it lies at the intersection of behavioural evidence and cultural myth. This paper examines what forensic profiling can responsibly infer from the surviving late-Victorian record, and where such inference becomes speculative. Rather than attempting to identify the offender, the study treats the case as a methodological stress-test for contemporary investigative psychology: incomplete documentation, inconsistent witness and inquest accounts, uncertain timelines, and pervasive media contamination mirror problems that continue to distort modern investigations. Using a conservative evidence-to-inference approach, the paper synthesises three evidential domains—crime-scene behaviour (including the distinction between modus operandi and signature), victimology and opportunity structure, and profiling under evidential uncertainty. Multiple plausible motivational formulations are comparatively framed (power/control, anger/revenge, sexualised aggression, and fantasy- driven repetition), while situational and instrumental explanations are treated as live alternatives, limiting diagnostic overreach. Two competing profile variants are evaluated—a locally familiar, socially functional opportunist and a mobile, marginal situational predator—demonstrating why both remain plausible given the record’s constraints. The paper concludes that modern forensic psychology’s principal contribution would be tighter inference controls via linkage analysis, behavioural consistency testing, and contamination safeguards. Overall, the central thesis is restrained: profiling is most defensible when it generates constrained, testable hypotheses rather than claims of identification.

Keywords: Offender profiling, Behavioural evidence analysis, Victimology, Geographic profiling, Media contamination.

93. FROM WHITECHAPEL TO BEHAVIOURAL EVIDENCE- WHAT FORENSIC PROFILING CAN—AND CANNOT—INFER

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